Age restriction access - over 18s only, but search engines allowed - how?
 

Folks, I want to add a script to my site which requests the visitor to confirm that they are over 18 before they can view pages, but search engine spiders are allowed access so that we get logged into the search engines.
Is there such a mod available? (Haven't found one).
How would I do this, please?

Why don't you just change the registration message for users? It's in the vB language manager I think.

That would apply to members, but I don't want guests reading the forums without first acknowledging that they are over 18.

You need to add nofollow tag to any links which reference the page you want to prevent spiders from accessing like so:

<a href="spidersforbidden.php" rel="nofollow">link</a>

This will prevent spiders from crawling the frbidden script.

Thanks, but that's not going to work, either, since I want the 'over 18' check to work on every page (it will have to be using Javascript) and that includes directly typing in the URL.

I am somewhat unclear on the reasoning behind having this feature. If I am not mistaken when a search engine crawls your site it also creates a cache in which users can browse. This almost defeats the purpose of age-restriction.

An alternate method is to grab the VBSEO sitemap generator and use that to generate your sitemap and submit to Google/Yahoo/MSN, then continue with the 18 year old user-restriction on every page.

You are referring to "good" spiders? If the script needs to be off-limits to spiders, would that require a rule in .htaccess ? Just a thought.

Ok, it's an adult DVD trading website www.adultdvdforums.com. I don't want to restrict access to spiders cos we need the site to get into search engines. I don't care if people see the content of the site from Google or other search engine caches, but I would like all visitors to the site to go through an 'I am over 18' check before they proceed into any pages. Should have made this clear from the top, sorry.

Presenting different content to a SE spider and to regular visitors is considered Cloacking and might get you removed from the SE.

Thanks. That could present a bit of a problem. I'll ask Google, I think.