[cobalt-users] re: Stop directory browsing

[Christopher Simmons - Mindset <cs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I recently noticed that one of my hosted sites had been registered with
lycos. The problem is that lycos searched out all the links to the image

direcotries etc. When you follow the link you can merily browse the
directory they're held in. Is there any way to prevent this? Thought of
making sure there is a index.html file in every directory but am not
sure if
that will be sufficient
Dave.

Dave:
there are several things: 1) you can set permissions on your directories
to allow execution but not "read" for everyone; 2) put an index file in
there (dupe your 404 file); 3) use a robots.txt file; 4) use META tags
which disallow indexing images (INDEX,NOIMAGEINDEX).
See:
http://www.send2press.com/mindset-netwire/articles/cs_meta-tags.shtml

You can also disallow Lycos spidering your images using a protection
service, like Mprotect:
http://www.neotropesoftware.com/neotrope_pr040901.shtml

Hope that helps. I do a mixture of all of the above for my clients when
developing sites (including my own).

Cheers!

Christopher