BCRA Online Archive - Image Proxy Server Implemented

[langcliffe]

As a further layer of protection against web scraping, the high resolution images are now served up by image proxy server functionality implemented within the software. The advantage of this is that the location of the images do not appear anywhere in the HTML mark-up. The effect on performance is minimal.

The changes should be totally transparent, but if you encounter any anomalous behaviour, I would be grateful if you let me know.

 

[langcliffe]

I have been monitoring the effectiveness of the archive software's proxy image server, and detected that robots were harvesting the proxy server image requests from links to the image pages on other sites (such as this one), and were attempting to access the images through that door. The attempts failed, as the requests had timed out. However, to ensure that this back door is firmly shut, I have re-written the proxy image server functionality so that the requests are now single-use.

Please let me know if you notice any "anomalies and exceptions" which crop up as a result.