I have a problem, I wonder if there is anything I can do about it.

I have spent the last five months building a 450 link directory using Gossamer. I have redesigned the layout, the fonts and the colours.

Today I have found that somebody has lifted THE WHOLE LOT and copied it onto another site. Links/style/everything. He's even copied my errors !

A) How can he do this?

B) Is there anything that I can do about it?

I am well pi$$ed off about this.

Any help please

1) If he or she is really bored, they can go through your site manually and steal content.

2) It is relatively easy to spider and collect complete web sites and then edit them. Even more easy today than a few years ago.

If the content is being taken via spidering programs, the agent used to spider your site would be recorded in your SERVER LOGS, you could DISALLOW this spider from accessing your site by using Disallow: AgentName in your robots.txt file in your ROOT directory.

If the person is manually taking content, there are some cloaking programs out there (although none of them I have found to be 100% reliable)...search the web for cloaking programs spiders. There are some Perl/C+C+ based programs at http://www.cgi-resources.com and http://www.hotscripts.com.

Another thing you could do is track down this person's IP address and then usewww.spamcop.net[/b] to look up the address, and then notify the offender's ISP/hosting company of their actions.


Regards,

Eliot Lee

Sorry to hear about that. I just checked out your site and have quickly seen what this persons done.

I'll email you to explain how he did it and what the probs are.

Good Luck!

Glenn

http://findarom.emusanet.com/comments3/

Would you mind sharing with us, Glenn? Guess that could be interesting to quite a few Links users.

I think the reason he didn't post it here was because he didn't want anymore people stealing sites. (especially the guy that had his stolen already)

Paul Wilson.
Installations:
http://www.wiredon.net/gt/

Glenn has given me some tips on securing my site more than it was before.

Let me take this opportunity to publically thank him. The support of this forum is always heart-warming - it's good to see that people will still help others at the drop of a hat.

One question that has come out of this is what CHMod should the data folder be. Glenn recommends 666 or 644 for safety reasons, however this does not allow me to 'build all'. 744 does, as does 777, but 777 leaves me wide open doesn't it?

Any comments?

Cakey

Yes it is not possible to chmodd it to 666 as it is then not writable by all.

I would recommend 766 for the data directory and 666 for all the files in it.

Paul Wilson.
Installations:
http://www.wiredon.net/gt/

I believe that such loopholes are of concern to the entire Links community. I was not interested in how exactly links got "stolen", but which measures had been taken against data theft. Anyhow, thanks for sharing that info.

Yes I realise that you weren't interested in stealing anything but I was saying that some people might be but I don't see any harm in sharing the information on how to protect your directory, just not how to hack it :)

Paul Wilson.
Installations:
http://www.wiredon.net/gt/

Hopefully, glennu recommended password protecting your data folder, which would prevent users from downloading your database files. One word of advice to other LINKS 2.0 users...after you become comfortable with Perl and LINKS, CHANGE the structure, so that people cannot easily access your information or scripts.

Regards,

Eliot Lee