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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
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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, their 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 - their 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 https://www.yourdomain.com/blackhole/. You should be banned from your own site. 

Moderation

List of blocked IP addresses is displayed in back office module configuration page. You can review use this list to review IP addresses. You can also unblock IP addresses that were trapped by mistake.

Configuration

You can change trap url if default https://www.yourdomain.com/blackhole/ does not meet your needs.

Rated 4.94 on the scale 1 - 5 based on 16 customer reviews
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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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Great idea. Yet to test.

Lets hope that those bad bots wont learn how to go around the trap.

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Top

Very effective

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So simple, yet so effective!

The idea behind this module is so simple yet the reality is that it traps bas bots so well. I've already had one of them banned from our site who fell into the trap, although how smart the bots become to navigate around the black hole remains to be seen, although I suspect if the bot were that intelligent it would be a legit one that would respect the robots file anyway, too marks from me!!.

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