Peter James wrote:
On 1/30/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Thoughts anyone? Are there less drastic measures that might
be taken to prevent this kind of abuse?
A couple of people here mentioned CAPTCHA's. This is sort of the
standard
for preventing automated abuse (intentional or unintentional), and
there are
lots of example implementations out there, maybe even in whatever "custom
software" you use. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha
Even if you don't go the CAPTCHA route, just forcing an HTTP POST to
begin a
download will probably filter out a large proportion of errant traffic or
web bots. I see your robots.txt file is in order for the downloads area,
but of course that's just a gentleman's agreement...
I would be really careful about using these. A significant number of
people are visually impaired -- I work directly with one person who is
(he uses powerful magnifiers to read normal sized 10-12 point text) and
a second person who sits across from me in the office is blind. I don't
know how they deal with captcha verification, I will have to ask. Notice
what the wikipedia text has to say on accessibility issues. A maptcha is
probably a better solution but if you don't understand you are looking
at a math problem, you are also blocked out.
Bob Cochran
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