Blocking Bots on Your AVideo Platform

In an effort to enhance the security and performance of your AVideo platform, we provide a feature to block unwanted bots from accessing your site. This guide will walk you through how to enable bot blocking on your site by configuring the stopBotsList and stopBotsWhiteList parameters.

Configuration Steps

1. Access Configuration File:

   • Navigate to your AVideo installation directory.
   • Locate the videos/configuration.php file. This is where you'll add your bot blocking configurations.

2. Define Bots to Block:

   • Within the configuration.php file, you need to specify which user agents (bots) you wish to block.
   • Add the $global['stopBotsList'] array with values representing parts of the user agent strings of the bots you want to block.

   Example:

   $global['stopBotsList'] = array('headless', 'bot', 'spider', 'rouwler', 'Nuclei', 'MegaIndex', 'NetSystemsResearch', 'CensysInspect', 'slurp', 'crawler', 'curl', 'fetch', 'loader');

3. Define Bots to Whitelist:

   • In some cases, you might want to allow certain bots (e.g., search engine crawlers) to access your site for SEO purposes.
   • Use the $global['stopBotsWhiteList'] array to specify user agent strings for bots that should bypass the block.

   Example:

   $global['stopBotsWhiteList'] = array('facebook', 'google', 'bing', 'yahoo', 'yandex', 'twitter');

4. Save Your Changes:

   • After adding the arrays to your configuration.php file, save your changes.

How It Works

• The script checks the User-Agent header of incoming requests against the list of bots you've defined in the $global['stopBotsList'].
• If a match is found, and the bot is not in the $global['stopBotsWhiteList'], the request is terminated, and a message "Bot Found" along with the bot's user agent is displayed.
• Bots that are listed in the stopBotsWhiteList will be allowed access, overriding the block list.