Blackhole For Bad Bots

Reference: blackhole

Free prestashop module to automagically ban bad robots who doesn't follow robots.txt instruction

free

prestashop 1.6 prestashop 1.7 thirtybees

This is very simple free module for prestashop and thirtybees platforms. It is based on a very simple idea:

  1. you instruct all robots visiting your website NOT to open specific url

  2. this module will add hidden link from all pages on your website to this forbidden page. This link is perfectly visible to all robots, but normal visitors will not notice it at all (without looking into web page source code)

  3. when anyone access this forbidden page, his IP address will be immediately added to blacklist

  4. blacklisted visitor are forbidden from viewing content from your website

  5. shop administrator is notified about new entries to blacklist. They will receive email with WHOIS information about the visitor - his IP address, location, network, etc.

And that’s it. This trap will not affect any good robots who are following robots.txt directives. On other hand, all bad bots and crawlers will be eventually trapped and forbidden from ever collecting information from your site again.

Module activation

  1. edit robots.txt file in the root directory

Before you install this module, you need to edit your robots.txt file, and add following two lines

User-agent: *
Disallow: /blackhole/
  1. install module

  2. optionally, you can test it by navigating to http://www.yourdomain.com/blackhole/. You should be banned from your own site. To lift the ban, reset module from your back office.

Moderation

At the moment there isn’t any UI to manage blacklist. If you want to remove some IP address from blacklist, you have to make manual changes in database table called PREFIX_blackholebots_blacklist

Rated 4.93 on the scale 1 - 5 based on 14 customer reviews

Love it if...

excellent module better than others, on the other hand the absence of black and white lists in the backoffice and the possibility of adding IP and user agent is very desired!!

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Only installed a few days ago and it has already blocked 2 or 3 bad bots.

This module is working great.
Been receiving tons of spam emails about SEO optimizing services lately, this module seems to have reduced considerably those spam emails.
Cheers

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The module works

It works! It would be nice to be able to see somewhere which bots have been banned.

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I can't tell if this works but trust it's as good as the other DK modules

Some people can probably tell how well this works, but I'm sure it does

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I sucked!

Great little module.

When I tested it, it worked fine, I was banned from my own site. I got the message "You have fallen into a trap!"

This site's robots.txt file explicitly forbids your presence at this location. The following Whois data will be reviewed carefully. If it is determined that you suck, you will be banned from this site. If you think this is a mistake, now is the time to contact the administrator.

If bots learn to not ever go to yourdomain.com/blackhole then it wont work, but for now its all good.

Simple and effective.

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