Forum Moderators: open
Version started with Lite Bot 0816b. Then 0916b. Now, 0616B. Strange. Probably not really a version number?
Since [webmasterworld.com...] is closed.
Potentially a variant on the bot mentioned in the second post may be similar to what you are seeing as it's main feature is the changing UA string which uses a variety of names & versions - does this sound familiar? :)
My view is block them until you know what they do, preferably using a pattern match against the UA as this will overcome the version number issue.
Why block them?
Well quite frankly they are exhibiting rather suspicious behaviour for an "honest" crawler which would make me liable to watch it carefully, however if it ignores robots.txt (as suggested) then I'd block it in a heartbeat...
- Tony
Demo Bot
Educate Search
Full Web Bot
Lite Bot
Production Web Bot
Production Bot
They have all fallen into my spider trap after following links with the tempting word 'guestbook' in them. They come in from various IPs with differing version numbers.
Personally, I've written them all off as email harvesters since they go straight for the fake guestbook, ignoring all other links.
-Lars