blackhole bot trap how to test
 

Hi there I just installed, or at least tried to install this on a PHPBB forum....

https://perishablepress.com/blackhole-bad-bots/


Does anyone have an idea of how I can test this out to make sure it's working?

"include a hidden link to a robots.txt-forbidden directory somewhere on your pages. Bots that ignore or disobey your robots rules will crawl the link and fall into the honeypot trap, which then performs a WHOIS Lookup and records the event in the blackhole data file. Once added to the blacklist data file, bad bots immediately are denied access to your site."

Can't you just install the TOR browser, and visit your "hidden page/link" directly yourself? Then your TOR ip should become visible as being blacklisted.

You can also use curl, for example... from one of your second websites/domains (if on a different ip)

Dude, literally on the same page: https://perishablepress.com/blackhol...ckhole-testing

Sorry if I wasn't clear but my goal was to check that the invisible link was truly there for bots.

Look at your page source. You should be able to see the link in your code.

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Alright not sure if I'm an idiot and missed a step but blackhole is logging the IP's that visit the trap... but it doesn't seem to actually be banning them.

If you visit yourdomainhere.com/blackhole/ twice, you still have access? It works for the demo.

If you can't access that, but still can access your site, you probably missed the step of including the /blackhole/index.php file into your site's header.

Also, from what I could tell from the website - the script only checks for the user agent, and since Googlebot and such are whitelisted, any bot can easily spoof and use any of the whitelisted botnames on the list to bypass it.

Might get rid of some bots, but it isn't exactly bullet proof.

Yeah that much is working... I'm guessing adding
<?php include(realpath(getenv('DOCUMENT_ROOT')) . '/blackhole/index.php'); ?>

To a phpbb theme's overall header just doesn't do the trick...

And if you add it all the way at the top... at the first line?

Tried that, sadly didn't make a difference.

And when you add it to the first line of app.php?

didn't even know that was a thing but still no luck.