Banning robots

[roblasch]

I am being visited by a robot every five minutes like clockwork. The user agent is Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; EMonitor 6.0 Windows NT). It seems to be looking for the same page over and over. Does anyone know what this robot is? And why it keeps coming back every five minutes? Is it possible to ban this pesky visitor?

 

[ChrisHirst]

the UA and timing probably means that it is one of the site monitoring services.

If it requests robots.txt you may be able to block it with that.

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[roblasch]

Is there any way to tell what it is? Is there any way to stop it? Besides the robots.txt file, that is. It is looking for the same file every time, although according to the header, it will only accept image files. It is looking for a file that doesn't exist ... a cold fusion file. It gets redirected to a search page and returned a permanent 301 redirect ... and then it comes back in five minutes. Annoying to me because it triggers an email to me every time. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Homersim2600]

If you are running a PHP webpage, then I know of a really clever way to direct all robots to a specific "robot Page" where you can create a page with a whole bunch of search terms, links, and whatever. This is especially easy to do if the IP of the robot is the same every time. I believe the script to do the aforementioned was downloaded from the PHPBuilder website. The nice thing about the php page is that it doesn't actually "redirect" it just creates the HTML page on-the-fly.


LF

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."--Albert Einstein

 

[ChrisHirst]

tut tut suggesting a bit of cloaking. could earn your site a ban from the search engines if used for the wrong reasons.

But it wouldn't have any effect on this bot. What may work is sending it a 404 response, somebody somewhere should then start getting emails or paged about a site being down, assuming it is a mis-configured monitoring bot.

ASP Code

if instr(lcase(request.servervariables("HTTP_USER_AGENT")),"emonitor") > 0 then
response.status = "404 Not Found"
end if

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.