Search function in macports.org defunct

[Clemens Lang]

> On 17. Jul 2025, at 08:30, Christoph Kukulies via macports-users <macports-users at lists.macports.org> wrote:
> 
> Ah, I see, the pattern "http" triggers the malfunction. Must be a syntaxproblem in the search algorithm, since http is special.


Yeah, I figured that’s the case.


For a while, spammers hot linked to the trac search results with a full URL as search term. Trac has a feature where it adds a “quick link” to the bottom of the results when you do that, essentially generating a link to that page.

People were using that to abuse MacPorts Trac to link to their page so that Google (and I guess other search engines) would index their site as linked from MacPorts, presumably to increase their page rank.

I modified the web server configuration to block any attempt to search for http.*, which also catches “httpx”. I can take a look at making that pattern match http:// and https:// specifically, but that becomes a little more complicated because the colon can be encoded in URLs, possibly bypassing the filter and inviting the spammers back in.


Thanks for the report, though!