If you want to stop people from scraping your site, don't put it on the internet.

I know you weren't sitting there all riled up, intentionally posting something to sound mean or rude yet I thought back to an old saying from when we were kids, most of us were taught this; "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" - That's not you in my opinion. Since tone is always missing I can't assume but do you ever re-read what you type and realize its not offering one bit of help sometimes? I think the OP has a valid concern and wants helpful suggestions not a reply that can't be taken any other way but being a smarty-pants.

Spamgirl,

I think Max had an excellent idea... it may take more time to review the logs for certain guests with Paul's mod but if you do it now and find who you think the culprit is, it might help! Remember though that overseas a person can unplug their modem/router and BAM instant new IP address so if they happen to be where that can happen, lets hope they only scrape content and aren't toooooo web savvy :cool:.

FWIW, I get what Zachary is saying, but that doesn't mean I won't try to at least stem the flow. If we sit back and don't fight, we let the monsters win, and I refuse to do that in any situation. Nothing is hopeless. :)

Anyhoo, I agree that Max had an excellent idea! Already three IPs are sticking out like a sore thumb, and one of them seems to be the culprit (with a scraper I didn't even know about potentially being a second problem user). Based on their shitty web design skills, I'm hopeful that means they aren't tech savvy at all. :) Thank you all so much for your advice!

--------------- Added [DATE]1440343872[/DATE] at [TIME]1440343872[/TIME] ---------------

I've found the IPs and tried to block them with .htaccess. I included my own IP in order to test it, but I am still able to access the forum, I just can't see the CSS or images. Here is what I did:

order allow,deny
deny from ###.#.#.
deny from ###.#.#.
deny from ###.#.#.
allow from all

Does anyone know why it would be so wonky? I put it in the main folder of my forum (html1). My site is hosted on EC2, if that matters. I tried it last week and it worked, so I don't know why it wouldn't now...

Sometimes the truth hurts, but its important to understand the limitations of what you can do. You can ban an ip, but it will probably change and come back.

You can make it so only registered users can view content, but then your search rankings go down.

You can make some content pay only, but chances are if its stuff people want someone will steal it, and hopefully they don't do it with a stolen credit card.

I do think you should fight, just be ready for the long haul.

If they're actually stealing and rehosting your content on their site, you could try a DMCA, but it may or may not work.

I've been doing the DMCA, but they just change hosts every day. Now I'm blocking by IP, and just redoing it constantly. I've actually found *multiple* scrapers since installing the Track Guests extension, go figure. :/ I'll just keep up the good fight and hope I annoy them into scraping someone else lol

Is this what you are looking for ?
Limited Guest Viewing -- Motivate Guests to Register

It's not easy to prevent people from scraping your site.
IP's can be changed/proxies can be used and headers can be spoofed (thus making methods to detect the user-agent useless).

There may be one way to stop scrapers, that is to add a JavaScript check to your site before people are able to view your site. CloudFlare does this to prevent certain DDoS attacks. However people could simply just go to your site in a normal browser and save each file individually to their desktop.

That is! Thank you so much. :)

FYI, some times search engines can penalize you for this. It won't work for anyone who is blocking cookies, or who decides to use specific user agents that are generally white listed.

More often than not it just leads to:

- More Users leaving your site
- Some Users registering just to view content, but not participate.

Pretty sure spiders are immune to it. If memory serves. I used it for awhile.

But for the rest, you're right. All it really does is irritate people.