Nick Arnett said:
> People seem to assume that badly behaved robots are sucking away
> bandwith horribly and tying up servers. In almost three years of
> having various servers on-line, I have only seen one robot tie up a
> server so much that it was a problem.
You are truly lucky. I've watched about half a dozen of these over
the last month or so. Once I first noticed there were problems, I
began watching the server more diligently. Even good robot writers
sometimes fail to ensure that the robot/spider is behaving and a
misbehaving robot will seriously consume resources.
> In summary, most of the complaints about robots are theoretical,
> not real, so that a gripes forum would just amplify useless
> speculations about what would happen if everyone ran bad robots.
Well my gripes are not theoretical and since I'm sure that my
situation is not unique in all of this global Web, there must be
others with similar concerns and very real complaints about errant
bots.
> More to the point, the people who will cause problems are the ones
> who aren't paying attention, anyway.
Not necessarily. On two occaisions, the errant robots were from
well known sources who are probably on this forum. You will find,
Nick, that a number of webmasters will be clamoring for more
accountability in the automated programs being launched against
their site. A forum where the webmaster can go to try and determine
is this 'friend or foe' could easily do more good than harm by
helping to spread real information about known robots, spiders, and
wanderers.
It's going to be interesting to see who votes yes and who votes no.
I've got a couple of bets going with myself as to how the two
camps will break out :-).
-betsy
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Betsy Dunphy | Connections: A Southern Golf
Aesir Computing, Inc. | & Vacation Guide
email: bld@aesir.com | http://www.aesir.com/