AntiLeech helps prevent content theft by sploggers.
AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you've turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.
AntiLeech can detect a splogger bot using its User-Agent string (an identifier that some bots send when they are collecting data), or by IP address. You can enter a User-Agent or an IP address into the Options panel of your WordPress blog. When a visitor with a qualifying (any checked option on the options page) User-Agent or IP address visites your site, they will see only the generated content. They will see it in your page layout and in your feeds. Anywhere you're normally outputting content, that's where the fake content will appear to them.
Regular users whose browsers do not match these strings will see your normal content. RSS aggregators should be able to display your content normally, too.
AntiLeech also uses a trick to detect when new User-Agents have collected and displayed your posts. You may see a little "AntiLeech" graphic in your feed output. This graphic helps AntiLeech collect User-Agents that you might want to block. AntiLeech will tell you on what page it first saw the User-Agent, if it can, to help you better make the decision to block that User-Agent or not.
You can turn off this option if you don't want the image to appear in your feeds, but then AntiLeech won't be able to detect new User-Agents for you. The image is pretty small and unobtrusive, and doesn't link to anywhere.
In addition to all of that, AntiLeech will produce a robots.txt output from the User-Agents that you've specified in the options page, assuming you don't already have one.
You can now download AntiLeech directly from the subversion repository.
Red Alt is an outlet for Owen Winkler's web tools and provides a consolidated and organized archive of other online web development tools and resources.
