Urgent question: printthread on VB 3.8.7 Patch Level 3

[greetingsjb]

I've disabled printthread by editing the printthread template. However someone is still able to access it on our forum. I know they're accessing it because they are using printthread to copy entire threads and paste them on their site. When I disabled it I disabled it on all the styles accessible to non-admin groups. However after disabling it our content was still copied.

My question is how was someone able to access printthread with it disabled on all the style templates?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[Ace]

Maybe they just typed it in manually?

[greetingsjb]

Even when typed into the address bar manually it wouldn't work. I had it setup to give this message instead, Printable threads disabled.

I say it wouldn't work but they figured it out somehowc. Just need to know how now.

[Ace]

Could they just be copying it from the archive? What points to it being the printthread version?

[Lynne]

How about removing the printthread.php file from your site?

[greetingsjb]

Could they just be copying it from the archive? What points to it being the printthread version?

Pretty sure the archive is disabled on our board.. let me check and get back to you. The reason we believe they're using printthread is the way it is displayed on the copycat site. It looks almost identical to what a thread looks like when viewed with printthread.

How about removing the printthread.php file from your site?

We considered that but we do have customers that use it legitimately. What we did today is enabled printthread through the templates again and set it up where each day, each account can do up to X number of printthreads. This way when the troublemaker comes back to copy our content he will only get X number of threads before receiving page not found error.

Our concern is how they were able to access printthread with it disabled through the templates. And since they were able to circumvent what we had setup last week will they be able to do it again?

[Zachery]

What do you mean disabled it though the templates?
A link to your site would help as well.

[greetingsjb]

What do you mean disabled it though the templates?
A link to your site would help as well.

I disabled it using the following instructions: https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/show...-print-version

[Zachery]

As a quick friendly note, make sure your forum url is entered on your license.

You should also note, removing the link to a page does not actually remove the page. I can easily access your printhread.php page by just typing in the proper url.

[greetingsjb]

As a quick friendly note, make sure your forum url is entered on your license.

You should also note, removing the link to a page does not actually remove the page. I can easily access your printhread.php page by just typing in the proper url.

Ten-4

It is enabled currently but throttled to a certain number per day per user.

Any idea how they were able to access it last week when we had the template edited per the above post?

[Zachery]

You can easily get around a lot of limitations by changing ip/cookies etc.

If you think they're stealing your content from printhread just redirect the printhread request to the real thread, for everyone