Hello

The plugin is not working on this website.

I have also disabled every plugin. There is no cache plugin.

Would you please help me where the problem comes from?

On Site Health section there’s an option name called bbb_badbots and the size is 1.67 which is pretty big. Should i disable autoload for this option?

You mention in your FAQs that this plugin is not Multisite supported yet. Will it work on a multisite setup if the plugin is enabled on a site by site basis?

If you have this problem (like myself) the solution is to add this rule in your .htaccess file after first RewriteEngine On:

RewriteEngine On

#Redirect blackhole parameter to homepage
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)blackhole=([^&]*)
RewriteRule ^ /? [R=301,L]

Hi

Does your plugin work with Siteground and Siteground Optimiser plugin?

I see you don’t support cache with your plugin or does it cause issues?

My client is using Siteground for hosting and their cache Siteground Optimiser plugin. So hopefully it works OK.

The issue we are having is that in the Abandoned cart we are getting quite a few items in here that are NOT actual people, the plugin people suggested your plugin to reduce the spam bots adding items to the cart and producing false reports in the Abandoned Cart area.

Could you possibly confirm whether this might be OK to work?

ALSO could you confirm that your plugin could be used and work well for sites that have been compromised and cleaned up? I’m thinking that as I’m currently using Wordfence for sites that have been affected after cleanup, we keep an eye on attempts to the site as some look like bots trying to access certain files in the backend of a wordpress website at random. So I was thinking that this plugin would be good to put those BAD bots into cyberspace the black hole! Please advise if this is when most people would find your plugin handy for that ?

Thanks

Kristin

HI

Hello, I hope you are well. My question is clear: I want to ban all bots, not only bad bot

Thanks so much for this wonderful plugin, But it is a very big challenge to choose between this plugin and page caching. It would bea good option if this plugin supports page caching.

Many similar users like me are also requesting for this option, Hope you find this request useful. Thanks

Hello!

My page receives many visits from bots that stay for 0-20 seconds and leave. It is a new page and in recent weeks I have gone from having quality visits (20 users) to having almost 100 with interaction rates of 20 seconds. This is a content blog.

When I look in Analytics I see that the routes these intruders follow do not include the administration pages. They remain blog posts only.

Can the Blackhole for Bad Bots plugin help me stop receiving these visits? They mess up my metrics a lot and I suppose the SEO of my page as well.

I’ve tested on several sites using Cloudflare page caching. So even though I get alerts saying the plugin is working and even though running through the test as outlined in the docs, I get the Warning page that my ip has been blocked, I assume that this is a false message since the page has been cached and doesn’t display the “You’ve been banned” message. Is this correct?

Would it make sense to put the /?blackhole= in the header to stop the bad bots quicker?

Hello,

I have been trying to tackle the Bad Bots issue and found out about Black Hole plugin. However, I wanted to doubly assure myself if the plugin is compatible with Open Litespeed Webserver with Litespeed Cache.

Request if you could clarify on the same and let us know if we should go ahead and implement the Black Hole plugin

Thank You

Hello,

I just want to clarify a few things before installing and activating the plugin.

There are some .PDF reports on our sites which Google indexed and we added a few Disallow lines with them in robots.txt. Visitors can still get to that file by hitting a download button on one of the pages. I want to make sure that no one gets banned for trying to download the reports, or is this not possible?

Will the plugin overwrite my current robots.txt? Does it add the link in the footer and the rule in robots.txt automatically?

I guess these things are considered and only the invisible black hole link will move bots to the black list but I want to make sure that there are no other consequences. ??

Thank you ??

Hello Jeff,

First of all thank you for your work in keeping web security to a higher standard, this plugin and the others you have.

However, I’ve been playing for sometime with Blackhole for Bad Bots in the sites I manage for one of my clients and it blocks AIOSEO plugin’s access to REST API resources. I don’t know why. It is the most visited website from all my client’s websites. I have AIOSEO installed in all websites, but only this one is blocked.

Will you have time to explain to me why could this happen? Can I do something to whitelist these requests? At this moment I have disabled it to allow AIOSEO to work, but I would prefer to re-enabled it back.

Thanks,

Ciprian

• This topic was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by pictoru.

I wanted to inquire about the status of addressing the caching issue within your software. Despite employing multiple layers of security measures, it appears that certain bots are still able to breach our defenses.

Maintaining a delicate equilibrium between facilitating legitimate indexing processes and thwarting malicious entities is paramount. It’s worth noting that caching mechanisms have become ubiquitous in today’s technological landscape, spanning from server caching to cloud caching and even internal application object caching.

At times, the abundance of caching mechanisms can pose a challenge in terms of management. Our operational protocols involve implementing various caching strategies, including object caching and content delivery network (CDN) caching, which significantly enhance site loading speeds to mere seconds across different locations.

Although our assessments have favored Google Cloud as the optimal solution in most cases, we continue to encounter difficulties in curtailing the intrusion of these persistent bots. Despite employing obfuscation techniques, we have yet to mitigate their impact effectively.

I believe it’s imperative that we address this issue promptly, as it poses a significant threat to our operations. I welcome any insights or strategies you may have in combating this ongoing challenge.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

• This topic was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by neikoloves.

Is Blackhole for Bad Bots compatible with WP Optimize caching plugin?

With the Plug-in active, I can no longer view the sitemap, my page is blocked!
What should I do?
Thank you!

I’ve read through the comments and see that some plugins that perform page caching will cause issues. What about a web host (e.g. WPEngine) which provides core page caching? Will that cause a problem?

Hey, isn’t it too easy for robots? If they know about this plugin, they can define an exception on /?blackhole. Thank you for the explanation. Note: I’m not a programmer ??

Will your plugin work with 10web booster, it is a caching plugin.

Hi there, just wondering if the caching on the SiteGround servers stops this plugin from working? You note page caching and SiteGround has dynamic caching so I am a bit unsure as to whether your plugin works on SiteGround hosted sites? Thx I installed the free version but it seems there is no way of testing it is working unless you have the pro version. I’m also using another honey pot plugin called WP Armour – will the two plugins work well together?

• This topic was modified 10 months, 1 week ago by grantmahy.

For the stats of my websites I use Independent Analytics Pro. To keep bad bots away from my site, they recommend Cloudflare hosting. But I’m very happy with my current, Dutch hosting provider.

Therefore: does Blackhole for Bad Bots help to keep my stats clean?

Hello,

how can I configure the plugin for an nginx server?

Best regards
Julian

Hello,

On your website it says the following about WP Rocket

WP Rocket

• Required to disable page caching
• Empty/reset the cache before going live

What happens if you don’t disable page caching?

best,

Hello! My site is now on free hosting and they unexpectedly changed the php version from 7.4 to 8.2. After this, problems began with the site, memory consumption increased sharply. I suspect it’s a bot invasion. Have you checked your plugin to work with php 8.2?

Hello, is the plugin also compatible with Nitropack.io? It is not listed

Heho

Do you have some hints to get this plugin to work with translatepress subfolders?

Translatepress generates subfolders for each language:

e.g. /de/, /en/, /it/

So if I click on the link /?blackhole=id it gets redirected to /en/?blackhole=id

I tried in an private tab if I get banned, but I don’t. (or don’t I get banned because my IP is an Admin IP?)

Have a great day

Cy

EDIT: I removed the IP from the whitelist and still not get banned ??

EDIT2: My robots.txt gets managed by wordpress. Maybe the entries needs to be edited to wildcard subfolders

• This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by workcy.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by workcy.

I am getting spammed by bots using Russian emails like mail.ru or list.ru.

How to ban the entire email range from being able to even send a message? I don’t care about legit email users, I want the entire email range banned. And I never get contacted by Russians either, except spammers or people up to no good.

Hello,

I appreciate your plugin. I have been using it for a while now, but suddenly it has become a pain.

The plugin is adding ?blackhole= to my pages on Google thereby deindexing my indexed pages. I am losing almost everything I have worked hard for over the year.

I am not getting SERP clicks anymore.

I have deleted the Blackhole plugin and yet ?blackhole= is being added to my new pages every day.

Please help!

Thanks in advance.

I deleted the plugin but I still have robot restrictions caused by

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Disallow: /*blackhole/

Disallow: /?blackhole/

Please help

Hi, this plugin is causing that message for Safari. Had to uninstall.