First off, I don't surf gfy, I think I probably have one post there. I never saw your post, I didn't know about your solution, but, I don't see that there is any other way to do a webmaster friendly solution without doing it this way.

So, any similarity is just two people coming up with the same answer for the same problem. I got involved with this from a code perspective yesterday morning after seeing what Greenguy and Jim had done and came up with a solution that was a little more robust and flexible than their first version.

As for allowing the empty referrer, surfers use privacy software which blocks the referrer. Using your example .htaccess, if a surfer running privacy software hits your site, they get redirected to dark5.com, but, since they don't set a referrer, how do they get to click on the link back to your site? Try it in firefox, go into about:config and change network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0 and you should get stuck in the loop. (unless that should be a 3 to not send the referrer -- their config values are a bit cryptic and I didn't test firefox to verify)

It seemed to be a compromise that affected the fewest number of people.

As for properly supporting RFC3986 uri constructs, call me guilty. Ray Morris from StrongBox/bettercgi developed those when we were dealing with hotlinking with a bit of input from the board to make sure that any valid url construct would be covered, but, mangled urls would not be allowed access. I merely copied known tested, valid and working url constructs that absolutely supported every condition we threw at it ages ago.

Imagine someone bookmarking a members area as http://user:password@www.yourdomain.com/members or someone surfing from a subdomain of http://www4yourdomain8com.someother.info. The members area one would be redirected, whereas the person surfing from someother.info would be granted access.

If a surfer hits http://yourdomain.com/ -- they would be redirected for not having the www.

I still support the .htaccess the way that it was written in part to conversations held directly with Greenguy and Jim and in part due to conditions I thought of that would unnecessarily complicate issues for a surfer. As you have mentioned the javascript back button doesn't make sense, and that was addressed yesterday in private conversations with Greenguy and Jim as were a number of other issues that haven't been raised yet.

I'll state for the record right now that I didn't take your idea and today is the first that I even knew about it. I commend you for coming up with a solution prior to there being demand.

I would like to follow up on what we chatted about last night in the channel about "anti zanga approved sponsors" we would be happy to make the banners that were mentioned. hit me up on icq or email me

we at lotzadollars are committed to supporting our honest affiliates and won't put up with these kinds of scams.

we also appreciate all the positive feedback lotza received for takng this stand
|thumb

Are you that dense that the fact that this board is owned by Jim & myself and that when I post something that we are doing together, that means it's a joint project & the fact that I was the one that started the tread is moot? This is more Jim's project than it is mine, so when you call him a thief, you have to expect that he's going to reply.

You're not the 1st one to make up some htaccess coding to redirect surfers with adware installed - and if Jim & I have to sit here all fucking day trying to find a page that's dated prior to Oct 17, then that's what we'll fucking do.

Hey, I appreciate your long post.
but you don't really know how mod_rewrite works.
There are legit no referer surfers, surfers that come to your site
by typing your url in the address bar.

let me translate this code for you in human language:

If the User has Zango Toolbar installed and he's comming from no referer
or from adawaresucks or from yourdomain then DON'T redirect him.
The user is redirected only if it has Zango Toolbar and its not coming from (no referer) , adwaresucks, yourdomain.com

You can easily see that all no referer users are NOT sent to the Zango page and I really don't see the reason for it.

I didn't called anyone a thief, and you just proved Jim was in the wrong to begin with.

Are you trying to make it excusable for you ?

Its ok, I'll give you all credits, you can apply for a patent.

What I'm trying to prove to you is that NO ONE HERE READ YOUR THREAD ON GFY!

2 parties came up with a similar solution - you posted yours 1st & no one is disputing that.

But by you asking for credit, you're saying that Jim did read it & that he stole the idea from you.

Sorry to interupt discussion :)

It may sound like stupid question but I am not very good at this.
Need explanation about htaccess, Under same domain name have TGP and LL. Would It be enough to put It In public_html folder of my domain name or should I put separatly htaccess 1 for TGP and 1 for LL.

Here's the scenario that I came up with that was a problem.

Surfer with privacy software that doesn't send a referrer hits the site, has the ZangoToolbar installed. They are redirected.

They read through the page, remove the links, but, haven't restarted IE yet. While the toolbar is indeed removed so that the next time they run IE, it won't advertise the ZangoToolbar user agent, their current surfing session will still say that ZangoToolbar is installed.

They click the link at the bottom of the page, continue on to the site.

Their referrer is still blank due to the privacy software, the user is then redirected back to the Zango page.

I saw no simple way to keep that surfer without allowing the empty referrer.

Setting a cookie would be a little nasty and would lump any efforts right back into the antispyware vendors that pop up ads every time someone visits a site. Not to mention, their privacy software probably wouldn't accept the cookie in the first place. Requiring webmasters to install a small script that checked an IP database against surfers that had originally hit the site would work, unless the surfer used AOL and their apparant IP address changed from one of AOLs multiple proxies.

I felt it was a compromise that seemed to affect the smallest group of people without irritating a large number of people.

well,
Are you so keen on what you did that even if its broken you want to keep it ?
I offered you the easy fix, and this cd guy which I assume is your coder
comes to prove he has no understanding of what he does.

You can apply my fix from above, or make your own fix but don't persist just for the sake of it.

darksole, you are right...I am a theif. CD34 knows nothing about server software, Greenguy is an uneductated ass and guess what???

You are gone...

easy way out.
you should've applied it from the beginning.

ooops, squeeked a post in before I got to the ban button.

Wow...having read through this exchange...someone had a big bowl of cranky flakes this morning.

Darksoul, obviously you don't know these guys. Greenguy, Jim and cd34 are some of the most honest guys you'll come across in this business. IF their idea had originated from your post, you can be damn sure they would have given you the credit that you so desperately desire.

I just hope that someone is going to give credit to whomever the original .htaccess coders/inventors were - or else they're going to be pissed!

|waves| darkassoul

The thing is, I have no doubt that a bunch of people came up with the same idea around the same time. I invented nothing...all I did was spend 2 minutes writing the page and asked Sparky for an htaccess file that worked. Pretty much you guys saw my thought process in the other thread.

I didn't surf gfy one day looking for the latest pictures of cars they wished they owned and claim they do and stumble on his post.

As a matter of fact, boardtracker told me that there was another post about me on a different board. I went to read it and saw that it was copied from gfy. So, I went to gfy to explain how it all worked and even thanked the people saying good job. If I stole it from someone posting on gfy, I wouldn't go anywhere near there.

I have no idea why I am explaining it to you guys. You know the truth and I guessed the guy lost all credibility when he said Sparky didn't know what he was doing. That is, if he didn't from his second post.

Good to see you Useless :)

Does it really matter who thought of what first? The idea in the beginning was to combat something that has been going on far, far to long.

"why can't we all get along?" sort of a quote from someone but CRSis kicking in and I can't remember who?

I tried by letting him know if he wanted to help we would welcome it.

And your quote...I keep thinking, Larry King :) Someone King, I know that much :)

Maybe you mean Rodney King?

"People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?"

Surely don't want to misattribute anything in this thread.

;)

You mean it wasn't Larry King? :)

Hehehe, just too funny... That guy's got the attitude of a warez d00d or cracker with his phearsome sKillZ, so good riddance

Looks like your post nearly got lost in the |catfight|.

htaccess gurus, correct me if I'm wrong

I think it depends on how you have your dir structure set up. If you have an htaccess file in a folder it is considered a replacement for any htaccess files closer to the root domain.

If you have an htaccess file in the following:
yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com/dir1/

The htaccess file at the root (yourdomain.com) will not affect anything inside dir1, however it will continue to affect:

yourdomain.com/dir2/
yourdomain.com/dir3/

The htaccess file in dir1 will affect anything deeper than dir1:

yourdomain.com/dir1/subdir1/
yourdomain.com/dir1/subdir2/

htaccess is an all or nothing deal. If it's affecting dirs, then it's affecting them. If it's not, then it's not.

Does that answer your question?

Virgohippy's explaination is correct, however, you can add

RewriteOptions inherit

in an .htaccess that is below a parent .htaccess and it will use the rules from both.

So, you could set up your main rules in yourdomain.com/.htaccess, and add additional rules in yourdomain.com/dir1/ with the

RewriteOptions inherit

And the files served in /dir1/ would utilize both.

Cant we all get a long? - Hmm I always thought it was Cant we all get a long neck:

Oh, why can’t we all just get a long neck?
And make a toast to peace and harmony
Why why cant we all just get a long neck?
See how good gettin’ along might be

I’d like to buy the world a round
In a honky tonk on neutral ground
Where we can see inside we’re all the same
Pop a top and let the good times pour
‘Til we forget what we’re fighting for
I’ll ask again could someone please explain?

Hank Williams Jr

Course it may just be where I live :) since I know Guttermouth did a song similar to this |jester|

Thx virgohippy and cd34 for help and explanation

Jim,

Don't you think it would be more effective to display a dhtml popup than to redirect the surfer?

I mean sure, greenie only sees .15%, but some people probably see 10% and that means they'd be sending 10% of their surfers to another site... now i'm not saying that it's bad to tell people they have zango, but the way zango works, a user only gets a pop every hour or two, so the odds of them popping a new browser on your page is actually very small if the surfer is navigating link lists and tgp's because they are likely hitting 10's or hundreds of domains.

I would think that a dhtml ad would be more effective because the user could close it if they wanted.. your method seems like (unless i'm misunderstanding it) that it redirects every zango surfer away from the site.

This could be done easily with some javascript.

Hey QuickBuck,

Zango does not work that way.
If the surfer has Zango installed even if he types in the url manually in IE 6,
Zango changes the HTTP_USER_AGENT from MSIE 6.0 to ZangoToolbar.
There's no need for Zango to popup a new browser window to be detected.

An additional thought about dumping all Zango users, and it ties in with a comment I made about how sponsors should only red flag sales showing the user_agent and then investigate the referring URLs.

The surfer can still buy a membership, and the right WM would still get credit: If the link/keyword has not been sold by Zango.

As far as the low number of surfers being detected, remember that a lot of these installs where done for other reasons than porn, like games/musics/etc. So a lot of the infected computers may never hit a porn site.

What happens if Zango quits changing the HTTP_USER_AGENT? How would you detect it then? Just thinking out loud.

Hugs,
Danielle

I wish I would have an answer for you :(

No solution here, but a concern to go along with this whatif: I'd be wary of any solution that promotes a script/program that invades the privacy of a surfer's system. Anything more than detecting HTTP_USER_AGENT could start pushing things in the wrong direction... |sad|

well i applaud the effort and it's nice to see action taken :D I have to say if i was zango, i would just take a few keywords off the landing page and put a system wide ad to pop a spyware removal site or any porn site etc and grab all that traffic back....................

I've made quite a bit of research the last couple of days and this is what I came up with.
It's a batch file I wrote which is intended to totally remove Zango from the surfers computer.
It basically does the same thing as Jim's tutorial says plus a few things like removing Zango start menu shortcuts,
Zango cookies, windows prefetch data and all the registry entries I could find were created by it.

I believe it would be much easier for the surfer to double-click a file and get rid of that Zango crap than to manually delete all
those registry entries and files.

The downside of this batch file is that it does not run under Win95/98/Me because some of the commands I've used are
only available under Win2k and later. I've tested this on Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2 and it worked flawlessly.

If there's anybody out there who could test it on other OS's and let me know I would appreciate it.

I agree. Not everyone is going to feel comfortable going into the guts of their computer and deleting files.

i agree on that, you have to remember that these sufers are probably not that internet or computer savy, they voluntarily infected their computers with a "virus" spyware. Unfortunetly, these are also the people who still believe in $1 trial offers lol, and other things like that and probably convert 1:1 lol, so when people think well it's only 2.8% etc, maybe so, but it could be 80%+ of your 1:200 or so conversions.

Good point, babymaker.

Now imagine how much trust a surfer would develop with a site if that site not only informs them of malicious software on their system, but helps them remove it too... and still gives them free porn samples. |thumb

True, but not by having them do it manually i dont think they will dare, we need a program for them to use, even if it deletes cookies, the cookies get replaced anyway, as soon as they click back to the site.

Hey babymaker,

What's wrong with the remover I wrote? It's not a program, just a batch file, but it does the job and it does not delete all your cookies only the ones created by the zango toolbar.

|thumb yea, that's great! :) forgot about that, been busy.

Thank you for doing this. I will be installing this .htaccess on all my sites. Your page inspired me to write a freeware tool, that does everything on your page in one click.

This is for users who are afraid to go in their registry, or hunt around for files.

http://www.messedup.net/zango/zangodrop.zip

Feel free to add it to your sites, Jim, if you want to add it that page, or any page, it's cool by me. 100% freeware.

Is there any way I can get that file, or a list of the cookies it uses? I'd like to add that into my program as well.