Re: RFC, draft 1

Captain Napalm (spc@armigeron.com)
Tue, 19 Nov 1996 16:05:13 -0500 (EST)


It was thus said that the Great Martijn Koster once stated:
>
> At 2:15 PM 11/16/96, Darren Hardy wrote:
>
> >The Allow/Disallow rules are still geared toward excluding
> >resources from robots. If we added a 'Suggest: URL' feature,
>
> Which I'd like to.
>
What, exactly, is 'Suggest:' for? Something like documents that only a
robot/search engine would be interested in?

> >I'm not sure that Visit-Time is the best way to throttle robots.
> >Request-Rate also sounds too difficult for Robots to implement unless
> >it was very simple like 1000 URLs / day, but 10 URLs / minute is too
> >fine-grained. Then, I'd question its usefulness.
>
> Agreed.
>
I don't think it's that difficult. Something like (in some pigdin
computer like language):

var docs;
var rate;
var docrate;
string rateline;

rateline = getrateline();
docs = atoi(part of rateline before "/");
rate = atoi(part of rateline after "/");

switch(suffix on rateline)
{
case 'S': case 's': break;
case 'M': case 'm': rate *= 60 ; break;
case 'H': case 'h': rate *= 3600 ; break;
case 'D': case 'd': rate *= 86400 ; break;
default: error(); break;
}

docrate = rate / docs;


This will give you the amount of time to wait before requesting a new
document from the server. But anyway ...

-spc (What about Visit-time?)


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