Caching Work Around

Glad to help:

1) “Is the issuing with caching based on the source URLs where the nofollow links are (essentially the site), the link destination URL (blackhole), or both?”

Neither, the issue with page cache is that it prevents PHP from running. So that means dynamic scripts like blackhole can’t work.

2) “My thought here is that if it is just based on the destination, then any caching plugin that allows URLs to be added to an exclusion list would be OK. No?”

The trick is that the blackhole trigger is the same as the root URL of the site with a query string appended. So it is the query string that needs whitelisted, which as far as I know most cache plugins can’t do.

I hope this helps, let me know if I can provide any further infos.

Jeff,
Thanks for explaining.

I guess I was thinking it was more like:

Disallow: https://example.com/donotenter/

with a blank nofollow link on every other page to that page.

Then if that page wasn’t cached and it grabbed the IP and user-agent of anything that landed on it, that would be what would add them to the block list.

Cheers

Yeah that half of the equation makes sense and is something I have considered implementing. The problem is that, when banned IP addresses visit various pages around your site, they will not be blocked. Because again page cache plugins disable PHP scripts like blackhole. It’s not just the one “donotenter” page or whatever — it’s the entire site that is protected by blackhole.

@specialk

> Because again page cache plugins disable PHP scripts like blackhole.

Can you ask the caching plugin authors to provide an exception, eg., wp rocket

I’ve tried as have others. Some cache plugins have implemented solutions, others have not. I maintain a list of compatible cache plugins that provides more infos.