I've been looking at the WW robots.txt ...

...but why are these spiders disallowed?

[elgumbo]

Hi

I can see in the WW robots.txt file that the following spiders are disallowed:

User-agent: scooter
User-agent: grub-client
User-agent: grub
User-agent: looksmart
User-agent: Copernic
User-agent: ia_archiver
User-agent: ia_archiver/1.6
User-agent: Alexibot

I can understand the reason for disallowing most of the other agents but not the above.

Can anyone clue me up on why WW don't allow these agents?

Cheers

[trillianjedi]

They're a waste of bandwidth?

TJ

[elgumbo]

I thought it might be that but wasn't sure if there was another reason?

If bandwidth is the only reason then I will allow them.
The site doesn't struggle from too many visitors at the moment - so I think I can live with giving the excess bandwidth to the spiders... for now.. ;)

[Brett_Tabke]

> User-agent: scooter

Allowed AV in forever. They had 50k pages indexed and were spidering them 20-30 times a year. They sent us a total in 3 years of 350 visitors. They cost us a 1000 fold in bandwidth what they sent us.

>User-agent: grub-client
>User-agent: grub
>User-agent: looksmart

Homey-don't-play-dat. Worse numbers than AV.

> User-agent: Copernic

Why would we even consider it?

> User-agent: ia_archiver
> User-agent: ia_archiver/1.6
> User-agent: Alexibot

Security and liability risks.

[Kirby]

> User-agent: ia_archiver
> User-agent: ia_archiver/1.6
> User-agent: Alexibot

Is it true that alexa ignores this?

[sun818]

> Security and liability risks.

Can you explain? Are we talking about deleted posts that may be archived, etc?

[sem4u]

Are we talking about deleted posts that may be archived, etc?

I think so. Also, any threads that may need to be deleted at a later date.