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View Full Version : For the Webadmins: BecomeBot?


Air
12-24-2004, 10:35 AM
I've noticed that there's this exava.com/BecomeBot that's been literally pounding my websites for the last two or three months. I'm curious if anyone else has a take on this thing.

I checked out www.become.com but suffice to say the site is vauge at best-- not to mention I'm puzzled at how a website that is functionally inactive at this point can have any value or use to downloading all the content off my website every 3rd or 4th day. Don't these guys have to pay for their bandwidth?

Seriously though, my websites are small beans. They're not updated frequently and they aren't highly ranked or linked to from more than but a couple places, and Become accounts for more than 80% of all my monthly traffic. I did a little searching and found a discussion of web admins, several of whom stated it was hitting them every day, and that it's also ignored robots.txt content (or used to, might be fixed now). I'm considering banning it from my sites for the time being as a favor to my ISP. I can always unban it later if become.com ever becomes more than a shiny promotion for potential investors.

Anyone else have an opinion or additional information on it?

Sillysoft
12-24-2004, 11:16 AM
Yeah, I noticed these guys last month. They started hitting my server pretty intensely over the course of a few days. Definately not the correct way for a search bot to behave. I noticed it and sent them off an email telling them they were being naughty. Since then I haven't noticed any spikes coming from them.