How Can I Limit or Block a group of users?
This is an odd situation I have and it will take me a moment to explain. My site in question is ps[remove]tv[remove]alu[remove]mni.com/directory. Sorry for screwing with that url but I don't want this conversation to end up in Google. Anyway, the short background is that I know that another organization (who refuses to help me with anything at all) has been routinely updating their own records via my opt-in directory information. Although the information in my directory is free and publicly available, it is wrong of them to pilfer the fruit of my labor, "profiting" off my hard work. My directory is intened for personal use only and not for mass stealing of information. What can I do to stop them?
The only thing I can think of doing easily and without interfering too much wih "good visitors" is making a better TOS that is totally obtrusive. When you click on a person's link it can go to an intermediary page first that lists my TOS and click an "I agree" link before going to the real information. The TOS would make clear that my information is to be utilized for personal resources only and information found within may not be included in another directory.
The link to people's info goes like "http://ww.........ory/info.php?id=219 How do I make an intermediary TOS page come up first and force them to click an "I Agree" button before then being transferred to the right page? (Do you understand what I'm asking?)
Any other options I should consider?
Greg K posted this at 22:07 — 22nd April 2005.
He has: 2,145 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
About the best you can do is monitor your log files to find the IP they are coming from and block the range for them (or that one if it looks static).
If you do this, leave a static copy of what is up there now for them to see. They will already have this, and it will not tip them off that you are on to them
The downside is if you have to do a group, then anyone online in that IP range will be blocked, have to weigh if it is worth it.
We have something in place for our site (but don't use it anymore). Competition was watching our site and as we added a new service, hmm a few days later so did they. So we did a static copy, and if anyone came in on their Ip range (on xNIX shell, do WHOIS [IP ADDRESS] and if it isn't a static one, it will give you the range), they saw the static page.
We don't use that now, but the script is still there to log everypage they go to. They visit our site twice a day. (we should send them a thank you card for the constant hits huh LOL)
-Greg
Greg K posted this at 22:15 — 22nd April 2005.
He has: 2,145 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
PS. (yes I'm being too laze to hit Edit).
On the having the Agreement pop up on each item, this would require you depend on the "Referer" information being sent by the browser. (The content page would make sure you are only being called from the agreement page, else you could still grab it).
Off the top of my head, have the agreement page as a file to be included, then at the top of the info.php: *not actual code here*
* Check the referer page
* If referer page isn't itself (info.php) then you are first time coming here, include the agreement page, which then links back to info.php
* If referer page IS itself, they most likely just came from the agreement page, or another info.php page where they have already done the agreement.
Just a quick look at your site, would be pretty easy to mine the data. (I've done it before, but at least I used to do it "nicely", wait like 30 seconds between page calls so they couldn't say i was bogging their serer down, when I could manually browse and do SAVE AS faster). I don't do this anymore, don't feel comfortable doing it. In fact I offered suggestion to the one site on how to prevent others from doing the same. (Never told them it had already been done, and if they did any log monitoring, they would have spotted it.) The site is still the same.
Whatever system you get in place, let me know and I'll test it out for you. I'm pretty good at getting info I'm after. (legally).
-Greg
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