> Has anyone come up with a way to design a genealogical website so > that it is impossible for commercial outfits to harvest the > information? Or at least difficult enough to make it not worth the > trouble? I've toyed with mounting everything as graphics. Just > putting up a GEDCOM seems to me the perfect bait for the commercial > outfits' "bots." Finding a way to foil this particularly nasty > habit of the commercial concerns would be a good use of time, to my > mind! > > "Karen Rhodes" <[email protected]> I wouldn't say its impossible for commercial outfits to harvest the info from the site I created, but I think it's difficult. I basically created two versions of my family history site: a "lite" public version and a family-only private version using server security features with a unique username/password for each person to keep the "meat" out of public view. I do still want to help those individuals that may find use in what I've researched, so I create public versions of family tree branches in graphic format, which while tedious, makes it a little harder for robots to harvest. And I never post GEDCOM files. Of course I'm happy to talk with anyone who thinks there may be a family connection and share appropriate levels of information that way. As a last measure, I also make use of a robots.txt file to keep the search indexing robots that "play nice" out of directories or files I don't want indexed. My public pages are at http://www.mannfamily.cc/public/ in case anyone is curious! Regards, Joe -- Joseph Mann [email protected] The Mann Origins Genealogy Project at http://www.mannfamily.cc