The Dialectizer: How To Prevent Your Site From Being Dialectized

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How To Prevent Your Site From Being Dialectized

If you do not wish to allow your site to be dialectized by users entering your page's URL, there are a number of ways you can prevent The Dialectizer from doing so. They are presented here in order of most to least recommended. The different solutions are applicable under different circumstances and fulfill slightly different needs, so choose the one that works best for you. All other things being equal, we recommend solutions listed earlier rather than later.

Use a robots.txt file. The Dialectizer respects a use of a robots.txt file, located at the root directory of your domain. In this file, you can insert the following lines:

User-agent: dialect Disallow: /
Provided this robots.txt file is readable via the web, The Dialectizer will read this file before translating a web page. (You can test its accessibility by pointing your browser to http://www.yourdomainhere.com/robots.txt -- if the file comes up, it should be accessible for reading by The Dialectizer.) If the file contains the above lines, The Dialectizer will refuse to translate any web page located at the domain.
You can also use the robots.txt file to restrict access to one or more subdirectories of your site but leave the rest of it available to The Dialectizer:

User-agent: dialect Disallow: /directory1 Disallow: /directory2
In the above example, The Dialectizer will be blocked from any page on your site whose URL begins with: http://www.yourdomainhere.com/directory1 or http://www.yourdomainhere.com/directory2.
Email me. Send email to sam@rinkworks.com, indicating the URLs of the web site(s) you would like to have blocked from The Dialectizer, an indication that you are the legal owner of the given web site(s), and the request that they be blocked from access by The Dialectizer. The block will take effect as soon as we are able to apply it.
Web server configuration. If you have an Apache web server, or another web server that uses an httpd.conf file, you can add the line:

Deny from rinkworks.com
This will block requests originating from the rinkworks.com domain. The error message users will receive when they try to dialectize one of your pages won't, in this case, be the one we display when access from The Dialectizer is blocked by one of the other means given above but will rather be a less specific, less user-friendly error message. Applying this solution will require access to the web server on the web server machine, and the web server itself will need to be restarted after the change is made. Note: I haven't actually tested this method myself, so I would be interested from hearing from someone else who has.

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