>>>People seem to assume that badly behaved robots are sucking away bandwith
>>>horribly and tying up servers.
>>
>>They often do just that.
>
>Would you like to offer some evidence of this, or are we just supposed to
>get angry and call each other names to carry on the debate? (I write this
>with a smile on my face.)
The most recent runaway robot that I got bothered by requested some
20 URLs a second in 5-10 minute bursts.. enough to make the server
unuseable by anyone else, and it caused loss of income from advertising
as well as wasted time spent by me chasing the owners.
I won't name the owners because they at least had the decency to
compensate us for the lost income/time. I know for a fact that the
same robot was doing the same dumb things on other sites too and it had
triggered alarm bells.
So if you're willing to take my word for it, there's one documented
runaway robot. The robot(s) that started this thread (from uiuc.edu)
provide more evidence, if (as I am), you're willing to believe the
server owner's word that they caused big problems in these cases.
"I haven't been bothered by robots" isn't a convincing arguement
that robots don't bother others.
We can't all be crying wolf.
>This is exactly the thing that I think a gripes list would produce -- a lot
>of assertions with no evidence or logic.
I don't know what the currently proposed gripes list is for, and
I doubt if it'll be of use to me. I prefer to use the established
robot alert mailing list to warn others of the robots that I pick up
on, and get early warnings of other runaways from affected server admins.
With early warning of a runaway robot, I can block access to my servers
before they get the chance to trash it.
>As I said, I also think it
>wouldn't have any impact on the people who create bady behaved robots, who
>basically aren't paying attention, anyway (or are malicious and don't care
>what anyone else thinks).
I agree with that.
--
Rob Hartill (robh@imdb.com)
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) http://www.imdb.com/
...more movie info than you can poke a stick at.