Adrienne Boswell said:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed (e-mail address removed) (Nad) writing in
You could store their IP address in a session, and check to see the length
of time between requests.
Something along those lines.
I was thinking of detecting automated downloads.
When people simply look at the information manually,
it is all fine and dandy.
But when they start running a program to download hundreds
if not thousands of articles, that is another issue.
But there are issues with this.
Some web hosting vendors do not allow the executables
to run as it is a security risk. They may not allow
cgi, php, even executable commands of ssi and javascripts.
Now, in order to detect a page access by the client,
you either add an ssi include statement to either cgi
or javascript, or make your pages dynamically assemble
with php. But what if you can not even run those because
the provider does not allow it?
Sure, you can shell out some serious bux to get yourself
a premiere hosting facility where you can have your own
virtual domain. But if you spent years developing tools
to automatically build a 20k+ article site, and are
willing to give the information for free, then financing
the top notch provider on the top of it, is not something
that excites my imagination.
There is an excellent provider - by.ru. They are free.
They are huge, several hundred thousand sites and free
email users. But they do not allow ANY executables to
run. They even disable the ssi executable statements.
So, what do you do in that case?