Now that I've got your attention... This may
technically be a web-site-related question, but it's just too trivial and goofy to go in any of the "real" forums.
A Parisian robot has developed a morbid fascination for [an] utterly innocuous and-- to most people-- excruciatingly boring page. It has visited 10 times since 19 May, with no sign of slowing down.
On its first visit I had no reason to think it was anything but a human. It didn't come from a search engine, which is unusual in this directory, but it behaved like a human. Landed on the page, immediately loaded up all related files (css, 4 linked images, favicon).
It came back the next day, and the next. Sunday off, and then back again. In retrospect it's a little strange that it was loading every single file from scratch, even the favicon. Unless you dump your cache at the end of every browsing session, you'd expect more 304's and fewer 200's.
Round about Visit Seven the curiosity became too much for me and I rewrote them to another page in the same directory, asking them to drop me an e-mail and explain what the fascination was. They didn't, of course-- and more to the point, this initial hit wasn't followed after a few seconds by a reload of the "real" page, the way a human would do. But it
was accompanied by css and favicon, as always.
Now I get suspicious and take a closer look at the raw logs. Turns out that except for that initial visit, all loading of associated files came at robotic intervals of 5-10 seconds. Humans don't suddenly start doing this. At least not unless they're on dialup, and people on dialup do not have fixed IP addresses.
I up the ante and rewrite them to the "I don't like your face" page. This is a special page for visitors I'm genuinely unsure about. (One of them is, I think, a Canadian college student who doesn't get enough homework. Or maybe he's a CS major and his homework is to make a robot, only he isn't very good at it. Another one might be a school that doesn't understand you can save an HTML file to your hard drive and have it there once and for all, so it keeps coming back for nibbles of Perez.) It says in huge print "I think I don't like your face" and then in normal print something like "If I'm mistaken, borrow a friend's computer and explain yourself." Needless to say there are no links of any kind on this page.
To date, my Parisian devotee has been told three times that I don't like his face. Each time he politely picks up the favicon (the page has no allied files) and goes on his way.
This is driving me bonkers. I cannot, cannot, cannot figure out what robotic need this specific page is meeting. The page shares a directory with 8-10 similar pages, but my friend has no interest in any of them. How it landed here in the first place is a mystery.
"It arrived. It has shown no interest in leaving."
qfm [edited by: lawman at 10:44 am (utc) on Jun 4, 2011]
[edit reason] link to own site [/edit]
