stapel

During a conversation with Support, the issue of bots arose. My site has developed a chronic bad-bot, scraper problem. (Note: By "scraping", I mean wholesale copying, frequently with automated software such as WebCapture or FrontPage.) Many spammer-scammer sites tweak their search-engine listings by including masked copies of utterly irrelevant snippets of text collected from my site. And no few others have scraped my site for re-sale. In my .htaccess file, I have banned many known scraper bots, so if one shows up admitting what it is (in the "user-agent" field), it is automatically provided with the "403" "forbidden" response, and gets no further. To catch stealth bots (the ones that hide or lie about who they are) and unknown bots, I have set up a "honey-pot" link that leads to a spam-bot trapping script; when a bad-bot follows the honey-pot link, the script is activated and the violating IP address is (temporarily) added to my .htaccess file. The bad-bot gets maybe a page or two, and then is shunted to the 403 page. To protect "good" bots (that is to say, polite, well-behaved bots such as the googlebot) from landing in the honey-pot, my robots.txt file warns against following that link. So I have a known problem, and have followed the standard advice with my .htaccess file, my robots.txt file, and my honey-pot script. I explained this to Support, and was told that I should come here, to the Forums, to learn how to prevent the bad bots from ever coming to my site in the first place. I had heard that this wasn't even possible, and I would be very interested to learn how this is done. Thank you. Eliz.

The Silicon Zoo contains images of graphics that have been engraved, embedded, or otherwise imprinted on processor chips for submarines, calculators, computers, and more. Many images have dimensions smaller than the width of a human hair. Enjoy! Eliz.

If you haven't already, you might want to provide this server information to Support. There may be some "in the background" difference between Server A (where the code is working) and Server B (where it isn't) that is more apparent to Support than to "front end" users. Perhaps that difference (if it exists) would help nail down where the problem is or what adjustment needs to be made to the coding. Good luck! Eliz.

FYI: In order to display "hidden" files (such as the .htaccess file), I'd set the "filter" to the setting recommended by the CuteFTP "Help" file; namely, "-rtaF". I have no idea what these letters stand for. Comparing these settings with those on another account, I clicked "Enable local filters (Let CuteFTP do the filtering)" and changed the "remote" filter to "-a". I don't know which part of these changes fixed the problem, but everything appears to be working properly now. Eliz.

I've been uploading files today using CuteFTP. Some of them need their permissions changed. When I used CHMOD in CuteFTP to change a PHP script from 644 to 744, the permission change went through, but the file then displayed (on the server side) as "filename.php*". That is, CuteFTP had appended an asterisk to the end of the file name. Sort of. If I then tried to do anything with that file, CuteFTP told me that it didn't actually exist. For instance, if I highlighted (select) the file and tried to "Rename" it, CuteFTP would tell me that "filename.php* doesn't exist". I deleted the file through the "File Manager" in cPanel, re-uploaded through CuteFTP, and changed the permissions in cPanel. When I "refreshed" the server-side file listing in CuteFTP, the asterisk was back. I had this problem once before, a couple of years ago, I think, but I can remember neither the cause nor the solution. I would appreciate any advice or suggestions. Thank you! Eliz.

Um... are you sure...? According to the cPanel documenation, "If you wish to have invalid emails send an error back to their sender, use :fail: as the new default address. If you wish to have invalid emails disappear, use :blackhole: as the new default address." So using ":fail:" would appear to generate and send a message (but not to the person who sent the spam), while ":blackhole:" would just make it disappear. Eliz.

To log into your friend's account (something I do frequently), you just need the login information. Ask her for her cPanel URL, her username, and her password. Then you can log in for her and make whatever adjustments she needs. Once into cPanel, click on "Manage Accounts" in the "E-Mail" section. I don't think you can really do anything to or with the "Main Account" listing; I just leave that alone. Instead, click on "Add Account", and enter the username you want to create. If I understand your post correctly, this would be the "michal" part of the e-mail address she's wanting to have. You can create as many accounts as she wants in this way. (Note: It would probably be wise to write down the username-password combinations as you create them, especially if you're creating more than one account.) Then go back into the "E-Mail" section, and click on "Default Address". It may say something now like ":fail:" (with the colons before and after). This means that any e-mail sent to the domain but not addresses to a proper account (that you've set up) will be "bounced" back to the sender. But since almost all such e-mail is actually spam with a faked "From:" field, this practice is now often discouraged. Instead, set the default to ":blackhole:" (with the colons!), so all that spam just disappears. The "contact information" e-mail address (available through the link above the "E-Mail" section) is a different matter entirely. This is the e-mail that Total Choice will be using to contact the account owner. For simplicity, many set it to their main e-mail address for that domain, but, as has been mentioned, if the domain goes down, the address becomes problematic. So it wouldn't hurt to leave the "contact information" e-mail address as the MSN address. Hope that helps a bit. Eliz.

If your site has some major divisions or major destination pages, you could provide an "index" with (fully resolved) links to those pages, in addition to the link back to the "home" page. This would help fill up the custom error page and get you up over the Internet-Explorer size limit, as well as making the error page more helpful for your users. Eliz.