Website Stripper?

I'm getting strange readings as browsers

[tulin]

Okay.

So, my site's not public yet..but lately I've been getting a bunch of hits and they all appear to be coming from someone/something using a browser called "Website Stripper". Can anyone fill me in as to who/what uses this browser? Should I be worried?

[ogletree]

If your site is public at all people will find it. It is just a program to download your site. There are a lot of bots out there. There are all kinds of reasons for people to be doing it. Most often it is some person making a scraper site. Look at www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt [webmasterworld.com] or A close to perfect .htaccess ban list [webmasterworld.com].

As always don't just copy things like this unless you understand them. What might be good for somebody might hurt you. Like WebmasterWorld's robots.txt will take your site out of the wayback machine forever. That could upset some people and make other very happy.

[tulin]

I'm sorry..I'm extremely new at this. What is a scraper site? And thanks for your reply.

[GaryK]

Website Stripper is a property in the browscap.ini file I offer for download on my website. I mark certain user agents as Website Strippers if they have a reputation for doing naughty things on your website like not respecting robots.txt. Then webmasters can look for that property and redirect the bot or whatever they want to do to it. Most of the web that uses browscap.ini is using my file since it's the only one that's regularly updated. Is the actual browser name showing up as Website Stripper?

[Stefan]

What is a scraper site?

There are a lot of crap websites that present themselves as directories, or search engines, to get Adsense money. From what I've seen, they use the ODP to kick-start things a lot of the time, but however they do it, they consist of no original content, just scraped data and sh*tloads of links out to many sites.

That's my definition, but others here might have a better one, (almost worth a new thread).

[tulin]

Ah, alright. I see.

I think a scraper site picked me up then, that may explain the website stripper listings. (And when I think about it, it does make sense - I've had some strange URLS in my referring links page.)

And yes, Website Stripper is showing up as the browser.

[Livenomadic]

The title of this thread is completely misleading... :)