Data Scraping Protection (DSP) is a new feature with Zap Calendar 4.2. When enabled, DSP takes Joomla's internal IDs in Zap Calendar URL's and replaces them with alternate, non-sequential IDs. This prevents your event data from getting stolen by bots or users using URL guessing or automatic URL generation techniques.
For example, a Zap Calendar non-SEF URL like this:
http://mydomain.com/calendar/option=com_zcalendar?view=event&calid=7&id=1762&Itemid=212
will be converted to this URL when DSP is enabled:
http://mydomain.com/calendar/option=com_zcalendar?view=event&calid=BF8A06622C9279C5&id=676E9E9F5EA074D4&Itemid=212
This works for SEF URLs too. For example:
http://mydomain.com/calendar/7,1762-friday-meeting
will be converted to this DSP URL:
http://mydomain.com/calendar/BF8A06622C9279C5,676E9E9F5EA074D4-friday-meeting
With DSP enabled, the internal event ID and calendar ID are replaced with a non-sequential number, making it impossible to guess the URLs of events. Interestingly, sh404SEF URLs will not change if DSP is enabled or disabled. However, you will need to purge your old links in sh404SEF's URL Manager to rebuild the SEF URLs using the new Zap Calendar URLs.
DSP may not be for everyone, but may be useful for sites where protecting your calendar data is important, for example, when users create their own events or when Zap Calendar's personal calendar feature is enabled. When data scraping protection is enabled, URLs in the original format will no longer work. It is best to enable this for a new Zap Calendar site or set the feature to "transitional" for existing sites. Transitional mode will create the new URL's but will still accept old URLs. Switching from transitional to full protection can be done later when use of the old URLs is minimized.
DSP is a site wide feature and is enabled from the global Zap Calendar settings. This feature works only with Zap Calendar URLs. It is available with all Zap Calendar free and subscription versions.