Bots

[Whiskerfish1]

I have been fighting bot traffic on my site for months.  I just this morning turned on Cloudflare to assist and one of the things they showed was where the Bots were hitting and it was heavy in the Gallery.  

So my question is there a way to stop guest traffic or at least guests downloading pics?   I currently have 78 "crawlers" downloading files from the gallery.  I have seen as high as several thousand. 

I have Guests turned off I think??  

Thanks 

Steve 

Virus-free.www.avg.com

[Adrian London]

I'm probably not the best person to answer this, as I don't host publicly.

However, can't you simply remove "Everybody" access to view the photos?  If they can view, they can download.

Also, you could try removing the Guest user from the "Everybody" group or setting a password for it. I'm no expert in this area.

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Adrian

[Adrian London]

I've come up with more advice 😁 

If your site is meant to be public such that anyone can look at the pictures, then there aren't any permissions that can easily be set to stop a bot from crawling every picture on your site.

One way to slow them down - if Cloudfare isn't doing this already - is to block IP address ranges, which is done in the ".htaccess" file at the root of your gallery install.

See:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18483068/how-to-block-an-ip-address-range-using-the-htaccess-file

https://www.ipaddressguide.com/cidr

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Adrian