Hipcrime,
You have taken the unfortunate stance of actually defending the actions that
your robot takes. You say you wish to satisfy everyone, and by sending your
initial message to this list, you have made a small attempt in that
direction. Hopefully you will continue the trend by implementing the following
in your robot:
Set the USER-AGENT field
Abide by the robots.txt convention
Put something in the header of every email message your robot generates, and
make available the details of this identifying mark.
Whether or not spamming is ethical or legal, this will allow *us* to decide to
some extent whether we wish to receive these messages or not.
If you choose not to do this, many will feel compelled to remove all their
mailto: tags, and you will have done the Internet community, and many web
users, a grave disservice.
Issac
Thoughts for the list - It's an interesting idea to try to shape what HTML
tags people use by creating a robot that would look for pages with certain
tags and abuse the server if it finds them. For example, a person hating the
<BLINK> tag could easily create a robot similar to HipCrime's that sends
rapid-fire HTTP requests to any server on which it finds this tag in a page.
If this robot was defended vehemently (and the source given away), as HipCrime
has done, one might be able to affect a significant reduction in the number of
occurances of the <BLINK> tag on the WWW as a whole. Seems like an interesting
project for a standards committee....
<this whole thing makes me sick>