Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations SkipVought on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Preventing website downloads

Status
Not open for further replies.

SLG

MIS
Dec 19, 2001
106
0
0
US
Is there a way for me to prevent someone from downloading my website & content? I am mainly concerned about my /images directory.
Thanks in advance!
 
Hi

Password protection. That is the one invented for access control.
[ul]
[li]Disallow access in robots.txt. Some downloaders will obey, but search engine crawlers certainly will index them.[/li]
[li]Check the HTTP_REFERER header. Some downloaders will be excluded, but you will deny the access for some legitimate human visitors too.[/li]
[li]Check the USER_AGENT header. Some downloaders will be excluded, but is a common practice to fake it.[/li]
[li]Check for interval between subsequent requests. Some downloaders will be excluded, but is very low probability to work.[/li]
[/ul]
Anyway, a visitor could just visit your site, than saving the images from the brewser cache. Or a proxy cache.

Feherke.
 
There is no real way to stop someone harvesting your website if you wish anyone (ie joe public) to view the site. The point of a website is to allow browsers to download content for display to users - so if someone wants to download your images, then as a long as a browser can, then someone can do it programmatically also.

--------------------------------------------------
Free Java/J2EE Database Connection Pooling Software
 
That is what I was afraid of. =( I'll play around with feherke's suggestions though. Thanks all!
 
Hi

Ooos. Now I see that I forgot the most important word in the first solution :
[ul]
[li]Disallow access in robots.txt. Some downloaders will obey, but search engine crawlers certainly will [red]not[/red] index them.[/li]
[/ul]

Feherke.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top