[ypg]

Hello everyone, 

For last few days our website was  experiencing very heavy load. We checked visitor log and found that a thousands of searches being performed in the format like this.

 

 

http://www.xxx,com/a...products.search

 

 

It appears that many bots/spiders and proxies are reaching search bar.

 

I have spoken to web hosting company who have suggested to add some kind of security such as captcha to the search bar.

I would highly appreciate if anyone can suggest how to achieve this or any other solution to stop bots/spider to abuse search function.

 

Thanks

YPG

[eComLabs]

try the following
 
- install and activate My change module
- create the app/addons/my_changes/controllers/frontend/products.pre.php file with the following content
 
 

<?php

if (!defined('BOOTSTRAP')) { die('Access denied'); }

if ($mode == 'search') {
    if (defined('CRAWLER')) {
        exit;
    }
}

return;

- monitor your logs

 

(!) Not tested

[ypg]

try the following
 
- install and activate My change module
- create the app/addons/my_changes/controllers/frontend/products.pre.php file with the following content
 
 

<?php

if (!defined('BOOTSTRAP')) { die('Access denied'); }

if ($mode == 'search') {
    if (defined('CRAWLER')) {
        exit;
    }
}

return;

- monitor your logs

 

(!) Not tested

 

Thanks for valuable code. Just applied, the server load appears to be down for the moment.

Will continue to monitor. 

 

I wonder if we can apply goggle reCaptcha to search bar, as a result such crawlers would not be able to proceed.

 

 

YPG

[eComLabs]

Yes, it can be done with simple modification. But search bar with reCaptcha will look ugly

[ypg]

Yes, it can be done with simple modification. But search bar with reCaptcha will look ugly

 

The solution provided by you is  working perfect. I think this code  should be part of original cs-cart installation. There is no need for captcha as it would look very ugly. 

[eComLabs]

I am glad to hear that our solution helped you

[ypg]

Unfortunately after few days they are back again today. I wonder it it is possible to allow product search only for customer who are logged in.

 

YPG

[eComLabs]

In this case use in the same file

<?php
 
use Tygh\Registry;
 
if (!defined('BOOTSTRAP')) { die('Access denied'); }
 
if ($mode == 'search') {
    if (defined('CRAWLER')) {
        exit;
    }
    if (empty($auth['user_id'])) {
        return array(
            CONTROLLER_STATUS_REDIRECT,
            'auth.login_form?return_url=' . urlencode(Registry::get('config.current_url'))
        );
    }
}
 
return;

[ypg]

 

In this case use in the same file

<?php

if (!defined('BOOTSTRAP')) { die('Access denied'); }

if ($mode == 'search') {
    if (defined('CRAWLER')) {
        exit;
    }
    if (empty($auth['user_id'])) {
        return array(
            CONTROLLER_STATUS_REDIRECT,
            'auth.login_form?return_url=' . urlencode(Registry::get('config.current_url'))
        );
    }
}

return;

Applied the code but this loads  'Sorry, service is temporarily unavailable.' page for everyone once you perform search.

[eComLabs]

I have corrected my post. It should work now

[ypg]

I have corrected my post. It should work now

Thanks, it is working now. But there should be some other way out to stop this.

[eComLabs]

Try to display issue to the bug tracker. May be CS-Cart developers will add something to the code

[P-Pharma]

Add CloudFlare.