Interesting new visitor.

worth banning?

[Woz]

I found this little fella 12.40.85.6 having a sniff today. Thing is, he was sniffing around a brand new *empty* site which had only been register a few weeks ago.

He belongs to [nameprotect.com...] , a "provider of trademark research, protection and watching services." They own the whole C block.

I checked my other sites and found nothing. Anyone else heard of him? Normally I wouldn't worry too much but the fact the site is new and currently empty does raise the curiosity?

Worth Banning?

Onya
Woz

[Key_Master]

I would ban it just based upon the fact that it's a snooper bot. I've place it in the webclipping.com category. It's not going to bring you any traffic (that you want anyway) so banning it isn't going to hurt your site.

Err....why don't you feed an exact copy of the nameprotect.com home page? Kidding of course. :)

[wilderness]

deny from 12.40.85. NAMEPROTECT, www.nameprotect.com, 11/27/01, 12.40.85.6

I looked at their site after a log entry.
The page it visted was crucial in my decision to deny.

It would seem that Nameprotect is chasing down clients names for copyright infingment as well.

In either event I'm not going to allow them to collect fees off my bandwidth.

[toolman]

>>>why don't you feed an exact copy of the nameprotect.com

That would be hilarious.

[wilderness]

>>>why don't you feed an exact copy of the nameprotect.com
>>>>>That would be hilarious.

Actually it is not all that far fetched.
You may be able via htaccess and mod to refer them back to their own page :-)

[Woz]

Thanks guys,

I'm on IIS so I think the best I can do is put them in the robots file and hope they comply.

Onya
Woz

[Xoc]

You could block their IP addresses. I'd do it at the firewall, but if you want you can do it directly in IIS.

1. Go to the properties for the web site
   
2. Click on the Directory Security tab
   
3. In IP address and domain name restrictions, click Edit...
   
4. Click the Add button
   
5. Select Group of Computers
   
6. Put in 12.40.85.6 and a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.
   
7. Click OK on all the dialogs.
   

[Woz]

Thanks, but not my puter. Me no have access to these thingies.

Robots.txt it is.

Onya
Woz

[Xoc]

Well, you could put a script at the top of each page that does a test of the incoming IP address. Then if it's a bad one, produce a 404 error.