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Is this an efficient way of cloaking? I have been wondering, since the Fantomaster list looks to be quite large, if there would be any advantage in parsing the IP list from a MySQL database as opposed to a flat text file, which was my original plan. Apart from doing some basic tutorials, I currently know very little about databases, but am sure that I can learn enough to be able to use MySQL if there was going to be a definite speed advantage to doing so.
Also, is PHP even the right language to be using? I notice that a lot of the commercially available cloaking scripts are written in Perl - what is the reason for that, and is PHP a realistic alternative?
The other thing that occured to me was to just use mod_rewrite and .htaccess in every domain with the spider IPs - is that a viable (or better) alternative to a separate cloaking script, and will it be faster or slower?
Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated. :)
My personal opinion about Perl and cloaking is that the codebase for most the the commercial cloaking scripts was written before PHP became popular, and just haven't been ported to PHP.
The other thing that occured to me was to just use mod_rewrite and .htaccess in every domain with the spider IPs - is that a viable (or better) alternative to a separate cloaking script, and will it be faster or slower?
This would work for a very simple cloaking script, but the Fantomaster's IP list is pretty long and running through such a long list of IPs for every page access would use a lot of server resources. A MySQL query would be more efficient.
Dan
