Robert,
It may be spam and it may be the Google bot just trying to follow every link in the page. They're only able to cast one vote per post because of the IP blocker. 1 happens to be the first link they come to. We're working on some ideas to address that in version 2. You could try adding something to your robots.txt to deal with this.

Ah... well that explanation certainly makes more sense. That atleast gives me something to work with. Thank you very much.

Best,
Robert.

rfranco wrote:

I love the Starrating plug-in, but I seem to be having a problem. My ratings seem to be dropping like rocks. At first I thought it was one of my visitors trying to be funny and giving me a lot of "1-star" ratings. However, its getting worse. Last night, EVERY post I have made got a "1-star" rating from the same IP address. There have been about 3 three different IP addresses that I have noticed this coming from.

I fixed Google and other robots spam on starrating plugin and democracy poll plugin (really unfriendly for spiders/robots) using robots.txt.

Here was mine:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /blogs/*&poll_id*
Disallow: /blogs/*method=vote*

But today I patched starrating plugin with rel="nofollow" to avoid robots.txt "Disallow: /blogs/*method=vote*" line.

So I patched file _starrating.plugin.php line (should be #385) as follows:

<li><a rel="nofollow" href="<?php echo $hturlnojs ?>" title="<?php echo $ncount ?> out of <?php echo $outof ?>" class="r<?php echo $ncount ?>-unit" onclick="javascript:sndReq('<?php echo $Item->ID ?>', '<?php echo $hturl ?>');return false"><?php echo $ncount ?></a></li>

and removed the starrating exclusion for starrating in robots.txt as follow, leaving only democracy plugin exclusion:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /blogs/*&poll_id*

Your choice. :) B)

See [url=http://www.masugadesign.com/the-lab/scripts/unobtrusive-ajax-star-rating-bar/]original plugin page comments[/url] for reference.

Hope it helps.

Bye,
Paolo
[url=http://www.drakeworld.net/blogs/drakeblog]TheDrake[/url]

rel="nofollow" doesn't stop them following ;)

¥

¥åßßå wrote:

rel="nofollow" doesn't stop them following ;)

That's true. :-/ "They" could follow anyway.

Any other hints apart keeping in robots.txt the following line?

Disallow: /blogs/*method=vote*

Bye,
Paolo
[url=http://www.drakeworld.net/blogs/drakeblog]TheDrake[/url]

robots.txt might stop a well behaved search engine crawler, but not a spam crawler. My plan is to add another voting link which will be hidden from users, but it will be the first one robots come to. They'll click it, the vote will get thrown away and their ip will be logged as having voted, preventing them from clicking on any more stars for that item. The crawlers are probably trying to click on every link, but the first star is the only one that gets logged right now.

personman wrote:

robots.txt might stop a well behaved search engine crawler, but not a spam crawler. My plan is to add another voting link which will be hidden from users, but it will be the first one robots come to. They'll click it, the vote will get thrown away and their ip will be logged as having voted, preventing them from clicking on any more stars for that item. The crawlers are probably trying to click on every link, but the first star is the only one that gets logged right now.

And what about using agent signatures in "/conf/_stats.php".

Bye,
Paolo
[url=http://www.drakeworld.net/blogs/drakeblog]TheDrake[/url]

Good Grief, can't you just use a captcha? Might as well not even have a rating system if the Bots can click on them.