Can’t this be abused?

  • Resolved rinart73

    (@rinart73)


    3 years, 3 months ago

    While the idea is interesting I’m a bit worried about the following scenario when a person would manually harm website of a competitor:
    1. Pretend to be google bot (change user agent)
    2. Press the link
    3. Block google bot for the entire website

    Did you take any measures to prevent this? Like whitelisting known search engine bots (Bing, Google, Yandex, Yahoo etc)?

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by rinart73.
    • This topic was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by rinart73.
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  • Plugin Author Jeff Starr

    (@specialk)

    Three reasons why that wouldn’t work, just off the top:

    1) The plugin blocks based on IP address only, and spoofing a specific IP address is very difficult

    2) A person “pretending to be Google” never would be blocked, because they are whitelisted in the default plugin settings

    3) Typically websites don’t surf other websites, people do. So the idea of “Block(ing) google bot for the entire website” doesn’t really make sense.

    I hope that helps, let me know if I can elaborate or provide any further infos.

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Jeff Starr.
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