droolingmnky
07-04-2006, 10:48 AM
Okay I'm honestly tired of getting all of these automated submissions.
Before I would occasionally see the description:
"My site contains information that\'s ...."
Any one that understands a bit of code can recognize the escape character before the apostrophe. That set off the red flag telling me I was being targeted for automated submissions.
Tonight I got home to see the final straw...
"description CONTENT="blah blah blah blah blah...."
Most of the automated submissions were decent so I let it slide, come on now this is complete utter crap. I'm now finding my time spent deleting some 70% of the submissions because they were improperly submitted.
Now I'm going to take measures to slow down the automated submissions but still encourage manual submissions. IE no captcha enabled.
It's pretty simple really.
First step is to rename the submit.php and the link calling it most commonly found in top_bar.tpl
Now I'm willing to bet that will stop a good 50% of the poorly coded submissions scripts out there. Time to add a little more obscurity into the mix, it will help hide our newly renamed submit.php from the search engines.
Let's take it a step further to prevent people from navigating to a category before submitting a link.
It normally looks like:
Content visible to registered users only.
Lets wrap it in this if statement:
Content visible to registered users only.
If your running 3.XX it should look some thing like:
Content visible to registered users only.
Now unless the user is on any type of category page then it will not display the link to our submit page..
How many people have the following some where in their logs as a search engine phrase? (I'm using awstats webalizer not sure if it's available)
"to validate the reciprocal link please include the" (without quotes)
It's the standard reciprocal text above the url reciprocal field.
Let's take a quick google to see what we get... Click for google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=to+validate+the+reciprocal+link+please+include+t he&btnG=Google+Search) wow 196,000 results in .48 seconds all pointing towards our submit.php url...
What do we do then? If your guessing it's gotta go you're right. You have one of two options. One either remove the standard text and replace it with some thing that means the same or, change the text to an image of the same text.
Now will my suggestions mean you will get less submissions, your darn tootin. I don't know about you but, I'm relying on advertising to cover the costs on my directory. Any thing that forces an actual person to look at my site is more of a bonus in my opinion.
Now is one question I won't answer in case it's ever asked.
"what do I replace it with?"
Reason is, people are always copy and paste happy (myself included). If an option gets posted then the whole point of me typing all this out is wasted.
Now is it functional? You betcha, it's running on http://www.droolingmonkey.com if there's any doubts.
I'd like to state that while this isn't a mod so to speak this is the most appropriate section for it. It should also work for 2.0 and 3.XX with out any problems.
Before I would occasionally see the description:
"My site contains information that\'s ...."
Any one that understands a bit of code can recognize the escape character before the apostrophe. That set off the red flag telling me I was being targeted for automated submissions.
Tonight I got home to see the final straw...
"description CONTENT="blah blah blah blah blah...."
Most of the automated submissions were decent so I let it slide, come on now this is complete utter crap. I'm now finding my time spent deleting some 70% of the submissions because they were improperly submitted.
Now I'm going to take measures to slow down the automated submissions but still encourage manual submissions. IE no captcha enabled.
It's pretty simple really.
First step is to rename the submit.php and the link calling it most commonly found in top_bar.tpl
Now I'm willing to bet that will stop a good 50% of the poorly coded submissions scripts out there. Time to add a little more obscurity into the mix, it will help hide our newly renamed submit.php from the search engines.
Let's take it a step further to prevent people from navigating to a category before submitting a link.
It normally looks like:
Content visible to registered users only.
Lets wrap it in this if statement:
Content visible to registered users only.
If your running 3.XX it should look some thing like:
Content visible to registered users only.
Now unless the user is on any type of category page then it will not display the link to our submit page..
How many people have the following some where in their logs as a search engine phrase? (I'm using awstats webalizer not sure if it's available)
"to validate the reciprocal link please include the" (without quotes)
It's the standard reciprocal text above the url reciprocal field.
Let's take a quick google to see what we get... Click for google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=to+validate+the+reciprocal+link+please+include+t he&btnG=Google+Search) wow 196,000 results in .48 seconds all pointing towards our submit.php url...
What do we do then? If your guessing it's gotta go you're right. You have one of two options. One either remove the standard text and replace it with some thing that means the same or, change the text to an image of the same text.
Now will my suggestions mean you will get less submissions, your darn tootin. I don't know about you but, I'm relying on advertising to cover the costs on my directory. Any thing that forces an actual person to look at my site is more of a bonus in my opinion.
Now is one question I won't answer in case it's ever asked.
"what do I replace it with?"
Reason is, people are always copy and paste happy (myself included). If an option gets posted then the whole point of me typing all this out is wasted.
Now is it functional? You betcha, it's running on http://www.droolingmonkey.com if there's any doubts.
I'd like to state that while this isn't a mod so to speak this is the most appropriate section for it. It should also work for 2.0 and 3.XX with out any problems.