Iconsurf

Thoughts on whether to permit this bot?

[Busynut]

Hi All,
Hope this is the right forum for this question.

In the last couple weeks I've noticed several hits per day with iconsurf as the referrer. I went to the site and learned that it's bot collects favicons from the web and displays them in a searchable database. I looked at my stats again to see if any of the hits were actual visitors referred by iconsurf and browsing my site. None have been so far - just hits from hotlinking to my favicon.

I have a hobby graphics site and I'm wondering if it's worth allowing iconsurf to display my favicon - I'm not sure I want traffic generated that way. If I were receiving real site visitors I might feel different, but all the hits so far are hotlinks.

Does anyone else have thoughts on iconsurf or experience with them sending actual site visitors?
Many thanks for your input.

[Palehorse]

It sounds similar to psbot. They grab images. Here is what I have found. Those types of sites seem to be the launching pad for folks that "hotlink" and steal your bandwidth.

I exclude them when I discover them in robots.txt

My opinion (and it's just an opinion) is these types of sites are parasites and offer nothing in return.

[uncle_bob]

My opinion (and it's just an opinion) is these types of sites are parasites and offer nothing in return

I have to agree with that. One of my sites got hammered when they hotlinked an image from their frontpage. It took me a while to work out what was happening, so I used mod_rewrite to fix the hotlinking, then robots.txt to bar iconsurf and finally after a few days I added the whole of their ip range to my barred list. Problem solved.

I hope theres an especially hot spot in hell for them where they can rot.

[Busynut]

Thanks for the input - I was leaning toward blocking them, too, and now I will. After reading the info posted about their bot - I couldn't figure out if it would revisit my site to check robots.txt within a week or 6 months - so I'll change my robots and block them from hotlinking in the meantime.