Forum Moderators: DixonJones
I visited the website thinking this may be a new SE's spider. I was wrong. The site was not a search engine and there was no info on the bot, at least not on the English pages.
The IP belongs to a French webhost. I've blocked the entire range to prevent this critter from coming back and sucking up my bandwidth.
I've written to an Italian ISP, but something gets lost in the translation....
Oh, let me add that I also banned by IP Number in my case. When he/she discovered the 403 they doubled their lines of spam and increased the visits per week. :o
I wish the one that is hounding me, (no pun intended) :) would realize that no matter what he/she does, no matter how long he/she does what he/she does, my hidden stats won't be seen by him/her or anyone else.
Yep, that's how it is with my site; the stats are only viewed by me, Googlebot's not gonna come spidering and giving them another "link" in the SERPs.
I think most sites have private logs/stats so log spamming is pretty much a waste of time for the spammer and a waste of bandwidth for the spammee...
It requests robots.txt as "TranSGeniKBot (http://www.tsgk.net)", then a random page as "TranSGeniKBot http://www.tsgk.net".
So IMHO it's an annoyance but not worth blocking (yet).
I going to go ahead and ban them since they are providing no benefit whatsoever. They aren't loading my site because my IP tracking software does not detect them. I did find it curious that they are only downloading 73 bytes of information with a http response of 200 loading the / URL.
What kind of information query only returns 73 bytes?
Lately, I've been searching on 'log spamming' and 'log spammers'. Unreal what all has been going on over in the Blog Communities. Seems as though all this Log File/Referrer/Guestbook spamming was started by the porn industry in an effort to garner PR and traffic via files accessible by webmasters, etc. I guess we're the untapped source these days.
I'll tell you this much of what I found. One individual put up a page that actually will log spam anyone you want simply by inputting the url. That's the extremes to which log spamming has gone in the Blog Community.
There are also posting there that speak to actual wages that can be made doing this uh, work. It described the pay per impression scale too. That is very suggestive of growth potential.
Now I know we should all have our stats pages hidden, but we don't. Worse than that, the log spammer does not know that either and subsequently keep right on a commin while all the time thinking he/she's doing well. Yeah, right.
These tactics have been proven and the porn industry isn't the only places spamming. Those that hit my eduational site are of bogus re-directed to Search Engine links or Lotto sites.
(Lately, some of those are checking out to be 404s, so maybe those complaints levied upstream of the website being spammed, have been read. Dunno.)
Anyway, I know it's possible to re-direct lots of things and before too awful long, I'm gonna learn how to send these guys back to their own ISP (or stand-alone clone machine) and let them spam their own logs.
Hey, one thing for sure. If it's their ISP and they happen to check their own access_log files, I can just about promise you log spammers will be looking for a new connection reaall soon.
So, let's direct them back to their ISP and see how long this practice lasts.....
<script>document.location = 'http://www.esnider.net/index.php';</script>
- TranSGeniKBot understands the robots.txt and takes care of it.
- TranSGeniKBot requests one page each 30 secondes on a same website (No rapid- fire).
- TranSGeniKBot looks only for HREF and follows it (no 'mailto:' SPAMBOTS sucks).
- TranSGeniKBot is coming from ns3417.ovh.net and its IP address is 213.186.38.67.
Regards...jmcc
The only URL drops I noticed in my logs were no value added bots.
In the past few days I've gotten 358 reqs/357 pages from TranSGeniKIBot. This is a lot more than the index and one random page and annoys me enough to disallow it.
Also, I'm seeing an even greater number of reqs from "Netscape (compatible)" which looks to be different than the Netscape browser, which is listed separately. It makes me think it's a bot of some sort since the reqs/pages are roughly equal: 508/502. (not loading images?) Anyone know about this? Does Netscape have a spider? I thought their search was Google powered....
From what's been posted here, if it is indeed a bot launched by a band, then I'm gonna get tough....
There are other bots I've touched on that say they only come by once-in-awhile too. Like, ah, Expired Domain Sleuth [webmasterworld.com]? Yeah, right. That one touts only one visit, but I see them with regularity.
Is the Internet so fluid that someone has to send me this bot repeatedly? Is ownership of domains in suck a state of flux that bots now have to peruse in search of dead domains on a regular basis? I do NOT think so.
Just too damned many of them to allow full and unteathered access.
Nah. I don't trust 'em.
Nah. I don't trust 'em.
Me neither - wasn't trying to imply that I did -
In this particular case, I think the dude got more than he bargained for after his maiden crawl - I don't think we'll be seeing him again - at least not w/a recognizable UA ;)
Somewhere in the back of my mind lies a nagging feeling there will be other ones to take his/her mis-guided place.
One of these days, I'll get figure out that .htaccess coding to send them all back to their ISP and let them Log Spam a bit closer to home. <lol> If they pay no attention to the 403, they might be more inclined to back-off this ploy when re-directed to the local ISP hosting them.
Yup, one day...
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Whatever
RewriteRule %{REMOTE_HOST} [L]
Work for that?
bcolflesh, the stuff you quoted above is exactly what they sent me, and exactly what they include in a link from their home page to an About TranSGeniKBot page. Note, it's a very small link at the bottom of the page. That page has been updated recently to make the purpose of the bot a bit more clear and to announce it was shut down as of January 22, 2004.
In their e-mail to me they claim their purpose is not to spam log files in order to promote their band. Rather, they are scouring the web for music links in order to make those links available to their website visitors.
I do not know if by "links" they really mean music files or if they are seriously trying to build a directory of links to stuff about music.
Either way, I have no reason to give up bandwidth to their bot.
