About every month or so, I've seen somebody run through a series of URLs to try and find vulnerable message boards to spam. Seeing as how there's not one, I find it worthless to have to guard against it. However, since spammers are worthless and stupid, they defy logic, and pester my site with their jibber-jabber. Also known as 'scrapping,' they are looking for vulnerable configurations to inject their spamly badness.

Okay, it's reaching a bit in the title, but you can minimize their reach with a couple .htaccess hacks and never see the message board scrappers. It'll depend on your type of server configuration, but this will work for most cases. Just put in these lines inside the .htaccess file in the root level of your server:

<Files .htaccess> order allow,deny deny from all </Files>

Redirect /forum http://127.0.0.1 [R,301] Redirect /forums http://127.0.0.1 [R,301] Redirect /phpbb http://127.0.0.1 [R,301] Redirect /phpbb2 http://127.0.0.1 [R,301] Redirect /board http://127.0.0.1 [R,301]

The first part prevents reading of your .htaccess file, and the second part finds all the places the scrapper's looking, and redirects it. The [R,301] means it's a permanent redirect, and as I've never had a link to any of them, no search engine's indexed them. In fact, the only time those pages would load was from the scrappers (the pages would show a vanilla 404 page not found screen).

If you see a continual load of pages and folders that don't exist, this technique could help you cut down on the needless worry. Now, if you used to have a message board at that location, you might want to think about redirecting to the current place. And, as always, somebody could be looking legitimately for your message board, but it's not likely that they'd go down a list.

status: published
lastmod: '2006-12-05T01:09:36.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
cms: wordpress
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