Site security being tightened
31 Jan 2014
The rise in the trend for peculiar request strings (that is, people trying to get to specific but nonexistent pages on this site) has prompted us to carefully evaluate the site's security. This kind of aectivity is useually associated with bots up to no good.
These malicious requests generate a mass of 404 Page not Found errors — which for search engine optimisation reasons is not ideal, not to mention waste of bandwidth! So we look very closely at our 404 error logs and take action to ensure that incorrect request strings are treated with the contempt they deserve.
Any spurious requests for nonexistent pages will return a 403 Forbidden error. Furthermore all malicious bots, web crawlers or IP addresses that continually act suspiciously will simply be banned.
As with all these new security measures faults can occur, if you find yourself getting a 403 Forbidden error drop me an email and tell me what you were trying to do, giving the full url (web page address) that you were attempting to visit, and we'll try and sort it out.
All this effort to keep content rippers, hackers and other non-desirables at bay. But worth it.
