Bots, Hackers & Copyrights

  • Let me start out by letting everyone now that I’m a former Nuke user. It’s a great program, however if one doesn’t have the time to sit and “guard” it, bad things can happen. I cut the cord on my site after it was hammered 200 times by numerous porn sites within 48 hours. All the known tricks didn’t help…. >:-/
    Part of the problem is a group of hackers from Brazil & Russia take great pride in doing Google searches and hacking peoples sites. While usually they do not do much damage other than taking liberty of adding themselves to the “God” user list and leaving messages such as “I got your password” with some graffiti likes signature attached.
    Since most do not want to pay the hefty $300.00 fee to remove the copyrights and links to Nuke in their meta tags, it was discovered that by scrambling the text, and including a image seems to have helped this “bot/hacker” problem.
    Personally I don’t like bots, but they are just an annoying part of the net that we all need to deal with. Are there ways to keep them from being less invasive? I don’t care about hit numbers as they mean nothing to me. My site is nothing more than a way for friends and family to know what I’ve been up to if they shouldn’t hear from me as much as they’d like.
    And can the copyrights that is written into WordPress be altered? Either by scrambling/encrypting the code and or by adding a image? Images can be caught by spiders, but I can deal with that.
    If I had my way, my site would be virtually invisible, however the only way for that to physically happen would be to only have a site in my mind, so I’m willing to compromise.
    Thoughts on these issues would be greatly appreciated.

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)

  • You could password protect your site using a .htaccess file.
    Post the login information on the ‘gateway’ page so that a real human can access the site but bots will just go away.
    Or forgo posting the login at all and only people you give the login can view the site.

    Also: for general information on turning away bots go to https://www.robotstxt.org

    In addition, I believe that because of the license behind WP, you can change all of the references to “WordPress” to “SequenceOfSoundsMachine” as long as the source code is still available for free, etc, etc, etc.
    Someone more famliar with the licensing could clear that up, but if you are that worried about bots it would be a good way to go. In addition, you could change all the wp-*.php files to wpss-*.php files and just make sure to alter all the source code appropriately.
    Thinking about it now though, the “Must register to view this site” would be a better option requireing less work ??

    Thread Starter Anonymous

    SequenceOfSoundsMachine– LOL I like that. Remind me to give you credit should I use it at some point.
    Odds are I’m just coming off as being excessively paranoid, but the bitterness of having to abandon ship because there was nothing else I could do hasn’t wore off yet.
    Anyway, thanks for the input. =)

    Just a thought – can bots get past password-protected areas of a site ? (.htaccess / .htpasswd)

    Thread Starter Anonymous

    I don’t see how a bot could enter a password- unless it was specifically programmed to do so or had a human operator watching it.
    I don’t see why they would go through that much trouble- except for a porn site.

    last reply was me

    Could be interesting if you really dislike bots
    https://www.webmasterworld.com/forum88/3104.htm
    And cheers Clay ??

    Thread Starter Anonymous

    Thanks for the link, but it’s a pay for access site. Something of which I’m not willing to do.

    Is it ?? I wandered over many of their forum pages without a problem, and I’ve paid nothing ?

    I have a spider trap set up on my site. It is a short script linked to a 1px gif at the top of my blog. Any stupid spider that follows the link gets it’s IP banned. I think that link is whereI got it from months ago- webmaster world is definitely an informative place!

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
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