There are a few crawlers on our site. Is there any risk that they have access to the content? What is an « acceptable crawler load/risk » before I would have to undertake blocking procedures with which I have few, if any, expertise?

They can only crawl public sites, meaning there is no security breach. But yes, they can access public content.

When the load is so high it has negative impact and you should buy more CPU and/or RAM. Well, I don’t know how easily that can happend on Discourse because solution is different, but PHP-based WordPress is quite easy to put on its knees. But Discourse is serving static and lightweight content for bo…

Also note that you can easily block crawlers via your admin settings.

I would be so grateful to know how…

Hopefully that isn’t just editing robots.txt because it works only with good behaving ones. There is actually only one effective but a bit more difficult solution: reverse proxy.

That approach is effective – we use it ourselves and recommend it to those on our hosting.

Should I read that Discourse is using filtering?

I’m not sure what you’re asking. We don’t block anything by default but we provide admins with the tools to be selective.

So you are trusting bots will a) read robots.txt and b) follow rules. Well, bad behaving ones don’t do either of those. And we are back where we started: if bots are anykind issue reverse proxy is the best solution. Thanks. That I would like to know.

What can crawlers see?

Community Building Data & reporting

HAWK (Hawk) February 4, 2024, 2:41am 6

Controlling Web Crawlers For a Site

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