>This is a public reply to a message posted by Benjamin Franz
>(18/09/96) - "Bad agent...A *very* bad agent".
>Autonomy does identify itself to servers, but via the HTTP protocol
>rather than as a robot. The reason for this is that Autonomy does not
>function like a robot, and it was felt that it would be misleading if
>it declared itself as one. Autonomy is much more like a user than a
>robot in its approach to documents. As such it declares itself as the
>User Agent of the owner, rather than a robot.
This isn't particularly clear, but recently I asked the Autonomy folks
for the user-agent string that it uses and was told
"Autonomy/version-number".
Some of us can selectively block on user agents :-) ... problem,
real or not, solved.
Now if only all unattended agents would use a common User-Agent
string I wouldn't need to pick them off one by one. Ooops, sorry, old
flamewar.
-- Rob Hartill (robh@imdb.com) http://www.imdb.com/ ... why wait for a clear night to see the stars?.