This forum is for general questions about Blackhole Pro. This includes but is not limited to installation, configuration, and anything else that doesn’t fit into one of the other forums. If you have a general question, please post it publicly using the form below. Or if you prefer, send an email to share privately.
Forum : General Topics
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I’ve been monitoring the Redirection 404s in my site – I get a lot of bots scanning for bad plugins, or site back-ups – I was wondering, if I redirected obviously nasty scan URLs to site.com/?blackhole – would that work? They’re not scanning the site for content but vulnerbilities, and I thought it would be fun to send them to the blackhole. I’m guessing it would need an ID on the end of the URL though for it to work, is that the case?
Yeah the random query string (WP nonce) would be required in order for that to work. Interesting idea though!
Dang, that’s a shame. I wonder if I could send them to a page that meta – refreshes to a the URL with the nonce? Thinking out loud. Might be a bit beyond my basic knowledge.
I like the idea and will work on something for a future update. It may be possible at this point, if you can find a way to get the nonce value and pass it along with the requests.
Hello.
Blocked user is shown a warning page:
“You have been banned from this domain. If you think there has been a mistake, contact the administrator via proxy server. ”
Link directs to contact page. But the contact page is also blocked!
What can be done so that the visitor can contact the administrator with a request to unblock?
Glad to help.
“What can be done so that the visitor can contact the administrator with a request to unblock?”
That is an excellent question. Even after developing Blackhole for years now, I still am not sure of an ideal way to enable a blocked user to contact the site admin easily.
One thing that helps savvy visitors is the default “you’re banned” message:
“If you think there has been a mistake, contact the administrator via proxy server.”
That explains one possible way of contacting the site admin. The idea there is to visit the contact URL via proxy service. Not all users understand that or are able, etc.
What some other users do is add a link to the contact page at an alternate site, where they are not blocked.
Some other users I’ve seen just link to a social-media profile. Like on Twitter, Facebook, etc. It’s trivial to contact someone on most social media sites.
As a last resort, you can use a free online tool to obscure your email address and then just include it with the banned message. Alternately instead of obfuscation you could display your email address as an image, which is harder (and less likely) for bots to read.
I hope this helps.