No bounds on calendar means web spiders crawl the links relentlessly

[elibird]

I am maintaining a Craft 3 site w/ the calendar plugin, and noticed that Craft's /storage/runtime/cache folder was filling up with tens of thousands of files and using tens of gigabytes of space.

I tracked the issue down by examining the webserver's access logs and found various spiders crawling the "next" and "last" links, resulting in dates both very far in the future and past.

I modified the twig templates (month.html, day.html, week.html) to include something like the following:

{% set month = craft.calendar.month({
    date: targetDate,
    calendar: calendarHandle,
}) %}

{% set the_diff = now.diff(month.nextDate)|date('%r%a') %}

<!-- CALENDAR NAVIGATION - MONTHS -->
<div class="calendar-nav mb-3">

    {% if the_diff > -365 %}
        <div class="btn-prev">
            <a class="btn btn-outline-secondary"
href="{{ siteUrl }}{{ calendarBasePath }}{{ month.previousDate.format('Y/m') }}{{ urlParamsString }}">
                <span class="fas fa-arrow-left"></span><span class="d-none d-sm-inline"> {{ month.previousDate.format('F') }}</span>
            </a>
        </div>
    {% else %}
        <div><!-- no link for spiders, but add an empty div to not break the layout --></div>
    {% endif %}

So, this is more of a feature request, but it would be nice if I could go into the general settings of the plugin and set bounds on the links like I've done in the template, so that at a certain length of time either forwards or backwards, the "next" and "last" links no longer appear.

Craft & Plugin Info (please complete the following information):

• Craft Version: 3.7.57
• Calendar Version: 3.3.16
• Calendar Edition: Pro
• Fresh Install or Upgrade: Fresh

[kjmartens]

Sorry for the delay @elibird.

Thanks for this suggestion. I'll make a note of the bounds setting idea for future consideration, and we'll also consider adding the workaround to the demo templates and documentation. 🙂

[elibird]

That would be great! It'll be sure to save someone a headache down the road.

[kjmartens]

We've updated our documentation as well as demo template examples in Calendar 4.0.2+ to include your suggested template-level approach. Thank you! 🙂

[andrewmenich]

Just dropping a link to the commit for anyone else that comes across this issue on older projects 5926d2f

[ahockemeyer]

Has this plugin be fixed? Our cache is out of control.

[kjmartens]

I'm not so sure we can build a solution that would stop this and work for everyone (for example, what if someone wants users to be able to click past 1 year, etc). We recommend the template-level approach above. 🙂