K-Meleon

[wilderness]

This appears to be a versatile browser.
It attempted a crawl, however it was requesting "relative" links of which most resulted in 400 errors while others resulted in 404's.

No robots.
No image.
Only hit one site.
I've denied the browser and the providers IP range.

208.65.60.zzz - - [17/Mar/2007:04:57:03 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 6779 "-"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20050610
K-Meleon/0.9"

[DanA]

As you know, K-Meleon is used by a lot of real people.
Could it be an offline browser using this User Agent or the Scrapbook add-on?

[wilderness]

As you know, K-Meleon is used by a lot of real people.
Could it be an offline browser using this User Agent or the Scrapbook add-on?

Dana,
1) I haven't a clue.
2) they won't be doing so on my sites any longer.
3) I likely denied more people with the IP range than
their are K-Meleon users in the entire world.
4) I don't see anybody passing out tissues so that
folks
with old machines or meek OS are able to wipe the
tears from their eyes for all the Java, Flash and
other crap sites that these folks are unable to
visit.
a) I added some incomplete whitelisting to around
four sub-directories that denys Web-TV machines
of all color and I haven't clue of how to modify
it.
As a result, I'll likly be removing the
whitlisting lines.
BTW, I'm sure the few lines do not allow any
exception for K-Meleon and many other scarce
browsers, however that is the ulimate goal of
whitelisting.

Don

[Achernar]

K-Meleon is a gecko based browser with a native windows UI (which is the reason why this browser has a much faster interface response than FF). It should work similarly to FF on your site.
I use it myself without any problem at all (though I have not tested your site).

Has that particular user requested so much pages that it's bothering you? :)

[wilderness]

Has that particular user requested so much pages that it's bothering you?

25-pages in 8 seconds, most of which were either 400's or 404's.
If it wasn't a crawl, it was assuredly an a failed attempt at a site download.
BTW, there's not a solitray page on either of my sites that may be read in a mere eight seconds.

[jdMorgan]

This activity is most likely a spoof of the legitimate K-Meleon browser [kmeleon.sourceforge.net]. You might consider a limited ban, such as that user-agent coming from that IP range only. K-Meleon is just a nice little Gecko-based browser from Sourceforge.

Jim

[Achernar]

Have you considered adding a honeypot page to your site?
It is usually very efficient against bad bots. And this kind of trap is not difficult to add nor to maintain.

[wilderness]

Have you considered adding a honeypot page to your site?

And what exactly may that be?
Might you have a URL example which explains this?

Or is just a bot trap?
[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

or Bill's early limited example of whitelisting?
[webmasterworld.com...]

It is usually very efficient against bad bots. And this kind of trap is not difficult to add nor to maintain.

I realize that your a newcomer at Webmaster World (perhaps you should read some old threads [as early as 2001]) and I do appreciate your attempt to offer something that you believe to be an effective solution, however?

If I haven't initiated automated scrips and/or traps after seeing so many other present and former participants of this forum utilize those practices, wouldn't you believe that a logic exists which determines that I monitor my logs and vistors manually?

Otherwise?
How could I possibly noticed this "so-called, pest visitor" and modfied my htaccess for any similar intrususions for the future?

See the 1st message of this thread!

I've denied the browser and the providers IP range.

Nowhere does my message suggest that I'm looking for a solution, RATHER I have omitted a "just a heads up" which is an accepted practice in this forum.

Don

[wilderness]

This activity is most likely a spoof of the legitimate K-Meleon browser. You might consider a limited ban, such as that user-agent coming from that IP range only. K-Meleon is just a nice little Gecko-based browser from Sourceforge.

Hey Jim,
My widget visitors are not exactly on the higher scale of geek technology :)
That's what makes these odd UA's jump out like sore thumbs.

Most use off-the-shelf machines with MS.
AOL is something that I'm required to tolerate.
The Web-Tv regulars are older folks who provide worthwhile insights that would otherwise be lost.

BTW, I was reviewing some old Sticky mails.
Somebody had sent me the following (which I failed to visualize at the time):

I'm sure glad *I* don't have to surf the Web with a 560x384 screen! Think what that would look like on a 42-inch TV -- Huge text, pixels the size of cigarette boxes, and you'd have to scroll on most sites to even read the sentences in the body/content if there was a fixed-size menu on the left side!

A highly unlikely prospect that a WebTV user would have a 42-inch TV as I believe most are still utilizing black and white TV's ;)

Don

[thetrasher]

This appears to be a versatile browser.

Web-TV

Some artificial intelligence visited your site with a browser via web tv?

I don't think so.

208.65.60.0/24 are IPs from a server farm, default reverse DNS is "reverse-mtl-60-***.e****servers.com" and the provider offers "Web Hosting Services - Dedicated Servers - Colocation Services". This visitor was a stupid bad bot spoofing K-Meleon's UA. No browser, no web tv, no real user.

I've denied the browser (...)

I see bots spoofing UAs of MSIE and Firefox. Should I deny MSIE and Firefox now? I recommend "deny from all" ;)

[incrediBILL]

As you know, K-Meleon is used by a lot of real people.

Define 'lot of real people' as I see maybe 1 or 2 daily visitors using K-Meleon out of 25K+

The attempted "crawl" could be pre-fetch.

However, it's very possible it's being spoofed as the IP address fragment you gave appears to come from a hosting company Exist Hosting, a subsidiary of InterWeb Media. Maybe it's one of their admins, but it's probably a bot or a proxy since it's coming from a hosting company.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 5:09 pm (utc) on April 9, 2007]

[Achernar]

Define 'lot of real people' as I see maybe 1 or 2 daily visitors using K-Meleon out of 25K+

It's quite easy to change the user-agent in K-Meleon (there is a preselection to choose from). I do this quite often myself, and sometimes forgot to reset it. :)

[GaryK]

It's been one of those days today so I'm not sure this is relevant. But here goes. I've been collecting user agents since around 1998. In that time I've amassed a list of 81,579 unique user agents. 30 of them have K-Meleon somewhere in the user agent. Three of those are obvious spoofs.

I've seen seven of them this year. Twelve last year. Nothing in 2005. One in 2004. The rest are from before 2004. If K-Meleon were causing my sites a problem I'd have no hesitation about banning anything with K-Meleon in the UA.

I believe most are still utilizing black and white TV's

Wicked funny Don. You and Bill always give me a good laugh. ;)

[edited by: GaryK at 11:12 pm (utc) on April 9, 2007]