> On 17. Jul 2025, at 08:30, Christoph Kukulies via macports-users
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Ah, I see, the pattern "http" triggers the malfunction. Must be a
> syntaxproblem in the search algorithm, since http is special.
Yeah, I figured that’s the case.
For a while, spammers hot linked to the trac search results with a full URL as
search term. Trac has a feature where it adds a “quick link” to the bottom of
the results when you do that, essentially generating a link to that page.
People were using that to abuse MacPorts Trac to link to their page so that
Google (and I guess other search engines) would index their site as linked from
MacPorts, presumably to increase their page rank.
I modified the web server configuration to block any attempt to search for
http.*, which also catches “httpx”. I can take a look at making that pattern
match http:// and https:// specifically, but that becomes a little more
complicated because the colon can be encoded in URLs, possibly bypassing the
filter and inviting the spammers back in.
Thanks for the report, though!
