This is not a bug, but a request to help us strategize.
We are finding that search crawlers are not just clicking through items actually visible on our site, but seem to be constructing random combinations of JFilters fiter-results.
Not only does this slam the performance of our server, but it creates inappropriate search links which could never have been constructed from the JFilters displayed on our pages.
Here is an example: a customer shared that Google presented a link to the following page:
This brings up a list of people who are not deceased trainers, but mostly are volunteers living in Indonesia.
On our actual page for Deceased Trainers (https://www.cnvc.org/trainers/deceased) you cannot generate this filter results URL, partly because Indonesia does not appear as an option in the filter, and partly because that page formats the the filter-results URL differently. It includes the category from this page, but the Google link does not:
With your deep understanding of how JFilters operates, can you help us devise a strategy for blocking such "impossible" filter-results links from being accessed. We use Cloudflare rules, robots.txt entries and .htaccess entries for such blocking.
We tried rules that require a managed challenge for URLS starting with "/filter-results-pages/" (and that string in multiple languages, as our site is multilingual using Linguise). That stops crawlers, but it also breaks the normal functioning of JFilters.
Or might it be possible for JFilters itself to disallow filter combinations that are not possible from the JFilters Module that is associated with a particular filter-results page?
Any thoughts will be welcome, even if you don't have a complete answer.
We love this product, and have built our site around it. But we are finding the power of it also brings some challenges.
