Hi all,
The fact of gambling websites sponsoring FOSS libraries isn’t a problem we need (or want) to solve. For example, we also use Smarty as a templating system, and the Smarty website lists a lot of gambling websites as sponsors of the project.
@hleonar, the code you point to (sponsors.php) is used to maintain the readme.md document also shipped with that library. In itself, the sponsors.php script does not generate any output.
It’s possible that search engines could index the readme.md document. It is one of almost 600 Markdown documents included in the lib/pkp/lib/vendor directory containing a mixture of changelogs, documentation, credits, etc.
I don’t believe Google indexes markdown content, so even if someone were to link to these documents in order to e.g. improve SEO, I’m not sure it would be effective.
Long story short, I don’t think there is a short-term problem that needs to be solved here, and as @jonasraoni points out, a long-term change will implicitly move this content out of the web root.
For folks who want to mitigate a perceived risk, you can always use a .htaccess file to prevent direct access to content in lib/pkp/lib/vendor.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team