[Sussex] Signing up to the Moot next week.

[Steve Dobson]

Mark

On Sat, Oct 23, 2004 at 11:49:02AM +0100, Mark Harrison wrote:
> Are you sure it was a prankster.

No - just my first thought.

> 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.  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.
 
> Are you able to track user agent that made the HTTP requests?

Yes as I can look in the logs, which I have just done - didn't think 
to look there before.  The IP address was 81.6.247.208

208.247.6.81.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer pure1.gotadsl.co.uk.

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

> My main (personal) business site gets spidered several times a day according
> to log analysis.

It looks like SLUG's is as well - I did see that my presentation of GPG &
your's on xAP are now on MSN :-)  Isn't good to see M$ spreading the 
good words on the power of linux :-D

> The solution would be, of course, to either remove the "Sign up Mark
> Harrison" button, or to write more code so that it checked user agent and
> only presented those buttons if it was a "real person" browsing. The quick
> and dirty solution might be to add a robots.txt ....

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.

Steve