WarmGlow - 8:55 pm on Jul 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

The vscooter robot is AltaVista's image thief. It requests image files which are used by AltaVista to create and archive thumbnail images. The vscooter robot does not obey the robots.txt exclusion standard. Both Scooter and vscooter are denied access to my image files by .htaccess directives because of copyright violations and disregard for my robots.txt denied directories.

# enable Apache mod_rewrite 
RewriteEngine on 
# deny access to JPEG, GIF and png files from known harvesters and 
# external referrers except language translators 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ArribaPacketRat [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Digimarc [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^FAST-WebCrawler [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} grub-client [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^InfoSeek [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mercator-2\.0 [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^MIIxpc [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^psbot [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Slurp [NC,OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Scooter [OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} vscooter [OR] 
# exclude requests with empty referrer string from RewriteRule 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ 
# exclude requests by Norton proxy from RewriteRule 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^Blocked\ by\ Norton$ 
# exclude known language translators from RewriteRule 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !fets\.freetranslation\.com 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !babel\.altavista\. 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !babelfish 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !translate 
# exclude my domain from RewriteRule 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example.com [NC] 
RewriteRule (.*\.gif$)¦(.*\.jpe?g$)¦(.*\.png$) - [NC,F,L]