Warning: file_get_contents failed to open stream error

  • A friend of mine is having some trouble with their site. Recently this warning

    Warning: file_get_contents(https://www.bostonproperrealestate.idxbroker.com/idx/search/single-family): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden in /home/bostonproper/public_html/wp-content/themes/bpre/scraper.php on line 10

    Pop’s up on the main page and the side bar on other pages.

    I went through the plug-ins De-activated than activated all of them and it didn’t change anything. Now i’m just stuck and need some guidance to fix this issue.

    Has anyone seen this? is there any way to trouble shoot this?

    Thanks in advance for any help.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • It appears that this site host was attempting to scrape data, either intentionally or by accident. This is in clear violation of both the MLS agreement on file, and IDX Broker Terms and Conditions. Our system team banned access to that server on March 25th.

    We recommend that you review this with your friend. If the data scraping continues, IDX LLC will need to send the client a 7 day deactivation notice before deactivating the account.

    Thread Starter olproject

    (@olproject)

    IDX Broker,

    Thank you for your help, would you be able to put that in layman’s terms for me? I will def. let my friend know about this.

    Also how would I go about fixing this problem?

    I don’t believe that this was intentional as they are trying to resolve this issue.

    Thanks again!

    In this case file_get_contents() is a php function that is being used to grab all the source code from a webpage. This action is commonly known as “scraping” since this action basically collects (or “scrapes”) all the data from a webpage. In fact this theme appears to have a file just for this action, wp-content/themes/bpre/scraper.php.

    It looks like your theme wants to get the source code from an IDX Broker search page for some reason. Whatever the reason this will have to be “fixed” in the theme. The fix here is to remove the scraper from the theme since it violates the IDX Broker TOS.

    I don’t know what used to go there where the scraping error is showing, but I would let the theme creator know that scraping of IDX Broker pages leads to an IP ban.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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