Anti-Fake Traffic Firewall

1. 96

   Alessio Ganciposted 13 months ago

   Hello there
   This is more a technical aspect, rather than a new feature.
   In the past I have written about how dangerous are traffic exchanges websites. Moreover, these may lead to banning from ad-network exchanges.
   
   I don't know if this question has ever been addressed, but in case: how can one defend a website against a competitor who tries to use traffic exchanges against other blogs to have them banned from AdSense? Or, even simply, against a new HP user who promotes their articles through traffic exchanges?
   
   I don't know if HP has already put some defences against traffic exchanges and fake traffic generators in general, but in case, I would like to suggest some features that would limit fake traffic:
   
   - AWS WAF (since HP is hosted on AWS), or some protection features integrated in Fastly (the CDN used by HP)
   - reCAPTCHA working in background and stopping most bots from accessing HP
   - a referral protection that blocks traffic coming from the most known traffic exchanges available in the internet (I cannot put the links here of course, but there are certainly some big names among the traffic exchanges that could be easily blocked)
   
   I think such a combination of features would protect HP sites from fake traffic.
   
   I would also like to report that such a kind of protection not only works against competitors or users trying to promote their articles with auto-surfs and similar stuff: it may also be useful to stop most bots scraping content to repost it on other websites (I filed a lot of DMCAs against articles scraped by other websites, and they were not only clearly auto-generated sites, but in some cases, even auto-translated in order to escape plagiarism checkers: the latter, is the most frequent form of plagiarism I have experienced).
   
   As written before, I don't know if any or all of these protections are implemented server-side: in case, I hope my suggestion may be useful, as I always thought about what could happen if someone deliberately tries to damage a website by using traffic exchanges, or if simply a new hubber tries to promote articles with traffic exchanges.
   
   Have a good day

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   1. 92

      Kenna McHughposted 13 months agoin reply to this

      Interesting. I get lost in the technical stuff. Perhaps water it down, define certain technical aspects and create an article to publish on your HP page.

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   2. STAFF

      Matt Wellsposted 13 months agoin reply to this

      We have protections against traffic exchanges and fake traffic.

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      1. 96

         Alessio Ganciposted 13 months agoin reply to this

         Hello and thanks for your reply.
         Am glad to know this. Since the topic I raised is not commonly addressed online, and I am the first who has not found many resources online about how do blogs address this issue, even on specialistic websites (only some vague references to what to do in case of invalid clicks on AdSense) am happy to know about this. I enjoy the technical aspects of HP, plus the various new features you regularly implement (cant' wait to see Rojo when it will be on all network sites), and writing much about IT and also web programming, am happy to know that HP has already addressed the potential issue, of which very few IT blogs seem to talk about.
         
         Have a good day

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      2. 92

         Kenna McHughposted 13 months agoin reply to this

         Good to know!

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   3. 69

      Miebakagh57posted 13 months agoin reply to this

      This is another blog I've been reading here today.                                                   It would be foolish to think that HubPages as a company and website operator has not the resource or ignrant to protect its websites.                                       Have a great day likewise.

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