processing / processing/processing-website

Mitigating website cloning & backlink abuse

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#641 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
MDX
Stars
90
Forks
122
Avg merge
1h 43m
Merged PRs (30d)
3

Description

Which area of the website does this enhancement relate to?

Other (specify if possible)

Describe the enhancement

We’ve run into a few situations this year where scammers copy our website and put it on fake domains that impersonate other organizations. We only hear about it when trademark owners contact us with cease-and-desist emails, because the cloned sites look like processing.org and still include our contact email.

@ksen0 suggested adding a simple build check:

  • Set an environment variable in GitHub secrets.
  • At build time, verify it against a public key.
  • If the check fails, display a small banner such as:

“This is not the official Processing website. If you ended up here by mistake or suspect misuse, you can report it below.”

I'd suggest including the following:

  • A link to the Google Safe Browsing phishing report page
  • A link to the WHOIS record for the domain, e.g. https://www.whois.com/whois/example.com

We can check for localhost and 127.0.0.1 to avoid showing the banner when working locally.

We could also not show our contact email on unverified builds.

Why is this enhancement important?
  • Reduce confusion for trademark owners who mistakenly contact us
  • Provide visitors with a quick way to report misuse
  • Make cloned sites less convincing and less useful for scammers

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the website's build process and how GitHub secrets can be used for build-time verification. Clarify the public-key check and behavior for localhost and 127.0.0.1, then define completion as an unverified-build banner with reporting links and no contact email.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
github-actions
Domain
build-system, security, web-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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