Scooter 3.3 ignores robots.txt?

this is ridiculous

[berli]

Just found Scooter/3.3.vscooter grabbing a bunch of files disallowed to all ("*") in my robots.txt file. The only thing I can think of is that the directories were named things like

img/ 
foo/images/

and I used a trailing slash. I saw here that apparently some browsers misinterpret that? Removing the slash somewhat bothers me, because what's stopping some *other* stupid robot from deciding that "foo/images" is a text file called images?

Does this mean I should block Scooter from certain directories in .htaccess? Let it chew 403's?

Or is this robots.txt-ignoring bot not really Scooter at all...?

IPs: 216.39.50.114, 216.39.50.13

[outrun]

There should be a slash at the front
instead of
foo/images/
it should be this
/foo/images/

regards,
Mark

[berli]

My mistake when I posted the example. The following is a real line from my robots.txt file:

Disallow: /img/

Other spiders, such as Googlebot and -- get this -- ia_archiver have obeyed this directive.

[mcavic]

I'd try:
Disallow: /img

That way, if it requests it with or without the ending slash, it should be denied.

stupid robot from deciding that "foo/images" is a text file called images?

As far as robots.txt is concerned, it doesn't matter what images is. It's supposed to just compare the disallow string with the beginning of the url.

Scooter seems to be obeying on my site.

[cespedes]

I have EXACTLY the same problem. I have the following robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /img

Everybody obeys that except someone which identifies itself as "Scooter/3.3.vscooter" and makes connections from 216.39.50.0/24.

Does anyone know how to solve it and/or notify the culprits?

[mcavic]

Apparently, vscooter is Altavista's image indexer.

See here: [webmasterworld.com...]

and here: [photodude.com...]

I don't know why it isn't obeying, but maybe try writing to Altavista?