Unknown MSN robt/spider

Does anybody know what this robot is?

[sidyadav]

I found a new MSN robot in my logs that I've never seen/heard of before. Here is its info:
IP: 12.222.34.99
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; MSN 8.0; MSN 8.5; MSNbMSNI; MSNmen-us; MSNcOTH)

Please tell me what this MSN robot is/does. Is it Good or Bad? Is it from MSN Explorer, MSN Bot (search engne bot), MSN messenger (can't be) or a staff member or something from MSN.

Regards,
Sid

[Dreamquick]

It looks like a human with a browser to me - presumably a user of MSN 8, their IP is attached to AT&T WorldNet Services which kind of rules out it being anything to do with Microsoft / MSN as corporations.

As it stands you don't explain why you think its a robot - so the best advice I can offer is...

If it's behaving like a normal user then I'd be tempted to call it a real user, otherwise if it's exhibiting robot-like behaviour then there's a good chance that they have just faked their user-agent for the purposes of whatever crawling they were doing.

- Tony

[sidyadav]

Hi Tony,
Yes, It has been doing some wierd stuff like I found this robot/human in my logs 10 times continously and it is not seeming to leave my page. It is going to 1 page 10 times a day! That is a wierd thing...

Regards,
Sid

[Dreamquick]

Tricky one... I'd be tempted to watch it for a little longer, if it stays pretty constant in the amount of traffic then leave it alone (unless you really need those 10 pageviews somewhere else).

If it starts to be more greedy then deny or block it and leave a nice little message explaining why.

- Tony