franklin locator

what is it and where to get it?

[wkitty42]

someone hit my site, the other day, with the franklin locator user agent and a referal address... i checked out the referal address and located a contact name... wrote them an email from one of my sneakemail accounts and asked them about their use of franklin locator against my site... that was several days ago... still haven't heard from them so now i'm wanting to know more about this franklin locator... what it does and where to get it... sadly, however, google only shows googled site stats pages and one or two discussion areas but nothing else... are these things regarded that badly?

[wilderness]

Only way anybody can help is if you provide Full User agent and IP #

[Dreamquick]

Also see;

[webmasterworld.com...]

- Tony

[wkitty42]

wilderness,

the agent is listed as "Franklin Locator 1.8"

i don't get ip numbers unless there is no rDNS...

franklin locator has shown up from...

pool-151-199-31-206.bos.east.verizon.net
38.114.3.27
adsl-68-72-107-138.dsl.chcgil.ameritech.net
208-40-61-226.corecomm.net
ns.artglass.com
pool-151-203-55-3.bos.east.verizon.net
ip68-104-76-127.lv.lv.cox.net
user-24-214-26-95.knology.net
ool-43572dce.dyn.optonline.net
user-1120nb0.dsl.mindspring.com

the last one got only one hit and then got trapped in my (finally working) useragent reject page...

artglass one is the one that i sent email to... it and one or two others really went thru my site...

these are in order of their appearance on my site... the first occurance was 29 Apr 2003...

i note that there seems to be a wierdness with it, too, in that it doesn't seem to get the full path in the URL like it should... my pages go deeper into the tree by just specifying a path down but not any of the path above...

ie: [mysite...]
would be in blah/index.html as foobar/file.html

[wkitty42]

dreamquick,

that thread talks about guestbook spammers and possibly harvesting of email addresses from a guestbook... however, i have never had a guestbook and none of the requests coming in have been for a guestbook...

on the other hand, that is one thread that i did gather a lot of useragents from to put in my block list... i think that list is currently at some 175 or so entries...

[wilderness]

Did you look at the link Dreamquick provided?
It seems Franklin is related to guest books.

I have no such creature or forums on my sites.
I do have group email discussions however they are keep separtely.

Should you desire to eliminate franklin from traveliing your pages in the future (have no clue what effect that will have on your guestbook?)

Just add the following to your htaccess.

SetEnvIf User-Agent Franklin keep_out
order allow,deny
deny from (any individual ranges you may desire)
allow from all
deny from env=keep_out

Please note Most anything you desire may be used in place of "keep_out" as long as it's referenced the same in both places.

[wkitty42]

wilderness,

yes, i looked at that link and commented that i had already seen it and actually used it to add more useragents to my block files...

i am still curious as to the use of franklin locator and
how to acquire it...

additionally, i'm also still awaiting some corrospondence from artglass.com since i did track them to actively using it against my site...

does anyone know anything about them other than what the registrars show?