Actually, you've completely mis-characterized the Roverbot service ... it is
a guided research agent that really is quite ineffective (by design) in
generating lists large enough to be of interest to spam mailers. In fact,
most usage of Roverbot relates to reciprical hyperlinking: for example,
feeding Rover a starting list of URLs from Alta Vista that have links to a
webmaster's old address allows building a quick database of webmasters to
contact.
I've been a part of this robot discussion list for some time, and you'll
find that Rover adheres to the complete exclusion standard (I notice your
log even shows it grabbing the robots.txt file.)
We've on purpose not made Rover able to access Usenet or other sources - I
hope you'll find that the service attempts to discourage the exact kind of
"spam" that you are accusing it of creating.
It'd also be nice if your initial posts were a bit more diplomatic than
"Roverbot - perhaps the worst robot yet", as you might guess that the
designers were participants in this group.
Brian
-------- REPLY, Original message follows --------
Date: Thursday, 27-Jun-96 01:02 PM
From: dws \ Internet: (dws@intercom.com)
To: robots@webcrawler.com \ Internet: (robots@webcrawler.com)
Subject: roverbot - perhaps the worst robot yet
I'm beginning to disdain it when a new spider hits my website...
Curiously I decided to check out that web page...This is how I am greeted:
Welcome to Rover
Rover is a unique Internet research tool that generates
custom email mailing lists by exploring webpages that
meet your criteria. Rover can utilize web page indexes,
search engines and other popular Internet site indexes as
starting points, allowing you to pinpoint just the companies
and individuals you want to reach with your message.
Great! Just what we needed, a spider/search engine for junk mailing. Of
course, it's a pay service. I guess they don't want to stick to usenet
post culling any more.
-------- REPLY, End of original message --------
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