[Sussex] Signing up to the Moot next week.

Mark Harrison Mark at ascentium.co.uk
Sat Oct 23 18:24:24 UTC 2004


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Dobson" <steve at dobson.org>
To: "LUG email list for the Sussex Counties" <sussex at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Saturday, October 23, 2004 3:51 PM
Subject: Re: [Sussex] Signing up to the Moot next week.


> > It's just struck me that it might have been a robot / spider?
>
> That is possible.
>
> > Any piece of spidering code that hit the site could follow every links,
> > including the buttons that are auto-created to sign up every individual
> > who's previously registered.
>
> It does fit the facts nicly.

Doesn't mean it's right :-)

> Except now that I have looked at the logs
> the site was hit my (at least - there maybe more) the msnbot and the
> googlebot and they *don't* post data.

> And the user agent reported itself as "Opera/7.54 (X11; Linux i686;"

Yup - it feels like a prankster then :-(

> I far as I can tell (being a bear of very little brain when it comes to
> bots and how they work) I don't think this would have helped in this
> instance as the "prankster" didn't request robots.txt and the agent is
> not one I want to block.

The robots.txt is only a solution if it turned out to be a (well behaved)
robot...

M.





More information about the Sussex mailing list