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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Bots subscribing to site--even with subscription URL is blocked in htaccess (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm using a self-hosted installation of PHPList to manage a newsletter.

Subscribers can be added via a POST to this URL:

https://www.[WEBSITE]/lists/?p=subscribe

It's presently overrun by bots.

I added this to .htaccess to block this URL

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^p=subscribe$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^ - [F]

Now, if you visit the subscription page above it will give a 403 error.

But, you can still add subscribers by using a POST to this URL.

How can I actually block folks from using this URL to subscribe?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Do you have any access logs on the server? Or can you enable them? Examine your logs and see what the bots are accessing, then block that?