grandma_genie - 2:43 pm on Jun 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

Personally, I think these scrapers are part of a botnet that can use any IP and appear to be from anywhere. I also think many of the bots/people who come to my site are looking for pictures. Just about every picture I've ever uploaded ends up on some blog or forum. But if they are hotlinked, most people can't see them anyway.

OK, forget the registering. Is it possible to make it so you can only access the site by typing in those sequence of letters/numbers that I see on some sites? That way you wouldn't have to input any personal info. Would that stop a bot? Would that stop a customer?

Yes, I have an ecommerce site. The index is by product category in alphabetical order. There are some visitors who come on the site and bounce around in various categories, and then there are the ones who just go through each category, one after the other, page by page. I assume those are bots, but there is no indication by IP that it is. Could just be a compromised machine. But who, what organization, would do such a thing? Could those doing this type of activity be producing a database, making some kind of comparison of what they sell to what I sell, pricing info? And who is my biggest competitor? A-m-a-z-o-n. Aren't they everyone's biggest competitor?

You know, I just typed my URL into Yahoo's search engine, and guess who came up on the first page of results. Yep, the Big A. And it wasn't an ad. It was the fifth listing.