Rip Prevention Mod/Begin.php Confusion

[Paul Wake]

I have something going on so odd I don't know if it's believable enough to post about, but here goes:

Awhile back I upgraded to TNG 7.0.3, except for index.php, topmenu.php, footer.php, genlib.php, and mediastyles.php, because I wanted to retain my existing customized formatting and menus, and didn't have time to figure out how to change all of that. This week, post hack, I've turned off register globals and denied external scripts, and I did a clean upload of all of TNG 7.0.3. I haven't changed the layout yet, and haven't been able to figure out how to add drop down menu items that not only display, but work (since the way I did it before isn't working), but I'll get to all of that eventually. I added the Rip Prevention mod (and the Custom Logs mod and the Captcha mod), and added a few words to begin.php after the word "sorry," and the rip prevention mod worked. But then awhile later it didn't, and in fact I'd just get a blank white screen. I fiddled around with begin.php, and sometimes when I'd add the code to the end of a URL that triggers begin.php, I'd just get "Sorry!" even when I had a begin.php file that said "Sorry! Script kiddies are not allowed here." So I'm totally confused. Sometimes with the same begin.php file my pages come up, sometimes just white screen. Sometimes running the URL with the trigger code that brings up the sorry message I'd get the stock message, and sometimes my custom message. Has anyone had something like this happen to them? If so, what's up with it?

Later-in-the-day edit:

I went to the grocery store with the site working fine, came back and it's inaccessible again. Just empty white pages. On a side note, I did figure out that the genlib.php line with "Sorry!" in it seems to override the begin.php line, but that's not especially important, and it's not what I'm seeing. What's unfortunate about the completely blank pages I'm seeing is that as soon as I removed the Rip Prevention Mod's line from begin.php (the one beginning with "subroot", which might or might not have a "@" in front, depending on which instructions you read), everything comes back up. Which raises the question: is anyone out there successfully running the Rip Prevention mod WITH Darrin's new rootpath addition to begin.php (the one meant to close a security hole)? What about with register globals off? If so, which of the two include statements are you using, the one with a "@" in front or not?

[Bruce Roy]

I have something going on so odd I don't know if it's believable enough to post about, but here goes:

Awhile back I upgraded to TNG 7.0.3, except for index.php, topmenu.php, footer.php, genlib.php, and mediastyles.php, because I wanted to retain my existing customized formatting and menus, and didn't have time to figure out how to change all of that. This week, post hack, I've turned off register globals and denied external scripts, and I did a clean upload of all of TNG 7.0.3. I haven't changed the layout yet, and haven't been able to figure out how to add drop down menu items that not only display, but work (since the way I did it before isn't working), but I'll get to all of that eventually. I added the Rip Prevention mod (and the Custom Logs mod and the Captcha mod), and added a few words to begin.php after the word "sorry," and the rip prevention mod worked. But then awhile later it didn't, and in fact I'd just get a blank white screen. I fiddled around with begin.php, and sometimes when I'd add the code to the end of a URL that triggers begin.php, I'd just get "Sorry!" even when I had a begin.php file that said "Sorry! Script kiddies are not allowed here." So I'm totally confused. Sometimes with the same begin.php file my pages come up, sometimes just white screen. Sometimes running the URL with the trigger code that brings up the sorry message I'd get the stock message, and sometimes my custom message. Has anyone had something like this happen to them? If so, what's up with it?

Later-in-the-day edit:

I went to the grocery store with the site working fine, came back and it's inaccessible again. Just empty white pages. On a side note, I did figure out that the genlib.php line with "Sorry!" in it seems to override the begin.php line, but that's not especially important, and it's not what I'm seeing. What's unfortunate about the completely blank pages I'm seeing is that as soon as I removed the Rip Prevention Mod's line from begin.php (the one beginning with "subroot", which might or might not have a "@" in front, depending on which instructions you read), everything comes back up. Which raises the question: is anyone out there successfully running the Rip Prevention mod WITH Darrin's new rootpath addition to begin.php (the one meant to close a security hole)? What about with register globals off? If so, which of the two include statements are you using, the one with a "@" in front or not?

Paul, I had a situation recently where all I got was a blank white page, no error message. All it was was a missing semi-colon at the end of a line in my cust_text file. The page won't load until it has completed all its php scripts.

So - is it possible that something in the mod itself or something in your amendments to code to implement the mod is missing a vital piece of php code?

Bruce Roy

[Paul Wake]

[Could be missing a semicolon]

Bruce Roy

Yeah, for me that would definitely be possible. Except I'm not seeing a missing semicolon, and this is a screwy enough situation that just a few minutes ago I uploaded begin.php with the rip prevention line, and surfed through my site successfully for awhile, and then my pages went white right out of the blue.

Maybe there's a ghost in the machine. I noticed today that the access log icon was missing--perhaps not downloaded with the upgrade?--and so was the relevant code in genlib.php. So I fixed that. But the gremlins will no doubt do something else.

SUBSEQUENT EDIT:

I may have figured out what was doing this. The rip prevention mod has an additional component apart from the warning and then the banning page that slows down harvesting robots; it has a captcha page that comes up for anyone looking at a lot of pages, even slowly (but one has to add additional files for that to work). I think that it was looking for the additional files for that captcha page, not finding them, and then blanking me out with a white page when it couldn't find them. The best solution would be for me to add the rip challenge, but when I did I found that it wasn't bringing up the custom text to fill in that page with the explanation of what it is there for, and what to do with the captcha. So I dumped the rip challenge files, found where to disable the challenge on the main rip prevention page, and then altered my settings so the rip warning page will get most slow harvesters too.

If anyone has used the rip prevention challenge captcha successfully in 7.0.3., please get back to me; I'd like to figure out how to make all the text display correctly on the captcha page.

YET ANOTHER EDIT:

Does anyone know whether the rip prevention captcha challenge works with register_globals off?