Can I Stop People From Downloading My Website?

[tdperfec]

He All

First time here, so please forgive me if this question
is in the wrong place.

Does anyone know of a way to keep people from downloading
my entire web site?

I have programs showing up such as "WebCopier" on my
access statistics page, where someone has downloaded
every file from my site.

Thanks for the help,
Patrick

[limbo]

It's the nature of the beast- webmasters will always like to have a good look at web sites that impress them - helps us improve our own skills (so long as it is not too literal!)

Every item you place on the web (well almost) has to be downloaded to a users computer for the page to run - like images CSS files etc. so you can't really stop it.

As for the piracy of site style and the theft of images and Jscript etc - its all par for the course and should be shrugged off

and dare I say it; even looked at as a compliment.

Ta

Limbo

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Added

Welcome to Webmasterworld [webmasterworld.com] :)

[ncw164x]

Hi tdperfec welcome to webmasterworld

Have a look at the links below which explain how to stop site rippers
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

The only true way to stop your site from being ripped/coppied is to take it off line

ncw164x

[limbo]

Ouch!

Site rippers! what the hell are these?

(reading the threads posted and feeling so naive!)

God, WW is an bloody education!

[tdperfec]

Okay, thank you both for the replys, I guess I'll
have to re-think my web site setup....

Patrick

[rmjvol]

You apparently can stop most of the people most of the time:

View Source Challenge [drpeterjones.com]

rmjvol

[txbakers]

in a word:

No.

You can't.

[Brett_Tabke]

very interesting link rmjvol. (thanks).

[bill]

I must say that Opera makes that challenge...um...very unchallenging...

[simonettaj]

You are so right I tried to get a CSS file from the register and IE went to download the file and then stopped and said "Internet Explorer cannot download Style.css from [theregister.co.uk"...] So I tried Opera and it gave it to me yippee. I'm not trying to copy anything just interest in a certain way the do a style for mouseovers and carry the hyperlink as well so you can hover you mouse over the menu in the table without being over the words and it still works as a link.

[theregister.co.uk...]

[Solution1]

It's also quite unchallenging in Internet Explorer. Just do File -> Save as, and you can see any file you want.

[ncw164x]

Not quite on every site, I have seen a few lately where the file could not be saved to your hard drive.

After reading message #10 I will try theses same site using Opera browser.

ncw164x

[Solution1]

ncw164x, What's the reason that you haven't been able to save some webpages?

[ncw164x]

When doing a file save as, it started to go through the motions of saving the page and then gives an error "this page could not be saved".

Only started seeing this over the last 4 -6 months.
Could be some setting on the server hosting the site?

Maybe someone else could give an answer

[Solution1]

I did a search in Google, and it turned up this Microsoft KB article: [support.microsoft.com...] .

Apparently this happens only with webpages containing Excel 2000 files (or if your disk is full).

[ncw164x]

Excellent Solution1

It was msn that I was trying to save so it is relating to Excel 2000 files and I have got ample hard drive space available

Just tried it using a different save as and It worked but has not saved any graphics

ncw164x

[too much information]

You probably won't have much luck preventing downloaders, but if you are working with a dynamic site you could always divert them from your important content which would buy you some time until you could ban them from the site.

I successfully prevented a downloader from stealing over 300 copyright protected images for one of my clients by having them download my homepage 300+ times with their site ripper. (Each page they tried to follow did a redirect to my homepage)

Once they hit the page at a rate higher than 5 hits per second... *ZAP* they were banned from the site.

You won't stop everyone, but you can definately deter the larger majority of fools out there.

<added>

Ok, I just read back a post or two. So the page won't download because it contains Excel 2k formatting, or content? I didn't really get much from the link. Would it be possible to prevent downloading by simply adding a small bit of Excel 2k content?