Hi, On Friday 28 July 2006 00:24, Gerard Seibert wrote: > I am not sure if this is the right place to ask or not. How do I go > about disabling the use of web accelerators like FasterFox or the Google > Web Accelerator? I have noticed that several sites now have a warning pop > up if you are using such a device and refuse you access until it is > turned off.
In addition to the User-Agent blocking already proposed, some sites also use a trick at a higher layer. Namely, they exploit that web accelerators usually follow links indiscriminantly, even ones that are not visible or clickable (a transparent 1-pixel PNG or a CSS-disabled link, for instance). If you add such a link to your webpage it is safe to assume that only robots "click" it; and once the linked URL has been requested you can do further processing (such as displaying a notice to the user on the next dynamic page load of the main page, or adding the user to a temporary blocklist; how that is implemented is left up to you -- you could check cookies, redirect with additional GET-parameters set, or have more intelligent handling inside your dynamic pages, for example). If you also make sure that the robots.txt excludes at least that one file, well-behaving bots will never trigger the script behavior. Combined with User-Agent checking, this will catch most of the cases. --Eike
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