Re: Robot Gripes forum? (Was: Anyone know who owns this one?)

Issac Roth (iroth@cisco.com)
Fri, 2 Aug 1996 17:05:36 -0700 (PDT)


Seems like Betsy's query as to whether or not anyone else had seen this robot
was a valid one for this list.

Seems like anyone who was thoughtful enough to read this list would not be
writing robots with behavior patterns such as the one Betsy noticed. Thus,
point 2 below (in her message) is probably preaching to the converted.

The purpose of robots-gripe would most likely be to attempt to reach
robot writers and ask/tell them to be more considerate with their robots.
Since these developers would probably not read robots-gripe (because if they
did, they wouldn't have written such an ill-behaved robot), I don't see how
the intended audience is reached. robots-gripe would surely become a place
where debates of the "rights" of robots took place, and flames were sent by
various webmasters about what they were going to do to counteract ill-behaved
robots. This has its place (and it might be nice to put that place on another
list), but it is not interesting to me.

Issac

> Rob (and others reading this post),
>
> Uh.. no flames... hope you got your coffee :-). I apologize for
> the posting. I saw others do similarly and I guess I wanted to see
> two things occur:
>
> 1. Try to identify the offender
> 2. Impress upon robot writers that they should really be
> considerate of others
>
> I've seen the flame-fest about antisocial webmasters and actually
> had a good laugh about it. Until that is I found my site to be the
> happy testing ground for some robot writers. I wouldn't mind too
> much except they pull all the controls out during testing and tend
> to have a large number of simultaneous connections during the
> busiest time of day for my web site. This could easily be construed
> as denial of service....
>
> I'd love to have a robot-gripes email list or at least some
> tracking forum where people can go to determine who these offenders
> are and have an email address where one can query as to their
> activities. Accountability is all I ask for....
>
> -betsy
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Betsy Dunphy | Connections: A Southern Golf
> Aesir Computing, Inc. | & Vacation Guide
> email: bld@aesir.com | http://www.aesir.com/
>