Jekyll is great at speed, which is why it’s used for GitHub Pages, but it’s not as flexible to maintain.

Hacked Wordpress

Some years ago this very blog got hacked. It was on Wordpress. Code was injected to all PHP and HTML headers, hundreds of spam posts were created. These posts made it to sitemap and got indexed on Google. The blog was dead. Epic failure.

Introducing DevOps

After some try ‘n cry development the issue got fixed by a migration from Wordpress to Jekyll. The blog entered DevOps era with automatic publishing on GitHub Pages.

The remaining issue was the indexed spam content on Google.

Configuring Jekyll

GitHub Pages ships with a sensible set of Jekyll plugins1. One such example is jekyll-redirect-from2, that can be used to resolve Google’s 404 Crawl Errors by redirecting content.

Even so, forwarding 404s raised by missing spam content does not make sense. 410 Gone would be a more appropriate response, but there’s no obvious way in Jekyll.

Enter Cloudflare

Cloudflare is great. Its free option can be used with GitHub Pages for TLS termination, caching, page rules. The latter can do redirects, but not 410.

Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers3 is a relatively new feature that allows running code at the edge. It’s running V8 for JavaScript instead of the standard VCL. Anyone with some basic JavaScript knowledge can create a custom response condition.

JavaScript for 410 response

Since all the spam URLs had a common pattern, e.g. /eoti4/<dashed keywords> or /nhuenh/<dashed keywords>, it took just 17 lines of JavaScript on Cloudflare Workers Editor to respond with 410 on all the spammy endpoints:

addEventListener('fetch', event => {
  event.respondWith(fetchAndLog(event.request));
})

async function fetchAndLog(request) {
  if (/\/(eoti4|nhuenh|nhueto|nhuegp|wish9y|nhsbsb|nhuekz)/g.test(request.url)) {
    return new Response("Page is gone.", {
      status: 410,
      statusText: "Gone"
    });
  }
  return fetch(request);
}

  1. Default Jekyll plugins on GitHub Pages ↩

  2. jekyll-redirect-from - Seamlessly specify multiple redirections URLs for your pages and posts ↩

  3. Cloudflare Workers - Run code at the edge, deliver powerful web extensibility ↩