West Wind Internet Protocols 4.xx

Never seen this before

[zCat]

Today I saw this UA hit my site four times in the space of 24 hours, each time fetching just the homepage; once from a Swiss residential IP address, and three times from IP addresses belonging to GoDaddy. It appears to be some sort of class library for Visual FoxPro.

Whatever, it's now in my Big List of Banned Bots.

[keyplyr]

Anyone can purchase this software. My initial impression after reading company product info was it could be used to scrape content so I've banned by UA.

[GaryK]

I couldn't find anything about this product on Google. Would someone please be kind enough to sticky me with a URL?

West Wind Internet Protocols 4.xx

Is this the exact user agent? If not what is it please?

Thanks.

[jimbeetle]

Dang, and the only relevant page that comes up on Yahoo is zCat's WebmasterWorld profile :-)

[keyplyr]

Gary, Jim - stickys sent

[jimbeetle]

Thanks keyplyr.

[Pfui]

I'm not sure why this is being kept a secret unless to prevent the company from changing it? Regardless, I would like to know, please, as would many of us reading along, I reckon. Is there no way to post the info? And if not, then please Sticky me, too. TIA!

.
P.S.
"West Wind Technologies Web Site, home of West Wind Web Connection [west-wind.com]"

[GaryK]

It's being kept a secret because normally we're not allowed to post URLs in our messages unless the link is to an authoritative site. I'm not sure who's in change of the Authoritative Links Department around here but I'm told there's a list somewhere. ;)

EDIT: Thanks from me also, keyplyr.

[zCat]

Sorry, forgot to mention the '4.xx' bit is a variable software version number, the one I saw was 4.52 or something, the site announced a higher version like 4.65

"West Wind Internet Protocols" gets the relevant site via Google.

[wilderness]

not allowed to post URLs

all you need to do is BREAK the link.

http ://www.ustrotting.com

[Pfui]

So-o-o just to confirm (not having found the UA online) --

West Wind Internet Protocols

-- is the beginning of the string? As in, oh...

SetEnvIf User-Agent "^West\ Wind\ Internet\ Protocols" no_way

?

TIA from an UnStickied One, sorry.

[wilderness]

-- is the beginning of the string? As in, oh...

SetEnvIf User-Agent "^West\ Wind\ Internet\ Protocols" no_way

?

If the UA begins with "West" the following is simple and sufficient.

SetEnvIf User-Agent ^West no_way

Begins with West and followed by anything. or any number of character.

The same short method works on:

Web
Get
Down
Grab
Net

and I'm sure there are others.

KISS (Keep it simple and stupid)

[Pfui]

I routinely use the nifty, one-word

SetEnvIf User-Agent ^Example no_way

, thanks, but just prefer to move from broad to narrow when first excluding any UA. (That's why I was/am looking to confirm the entire string.)

[keyplyr]

84.174.8.91 - - [24/Jun/2006:08:35:18 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 825 "-" "West Wind Internet Protocols 4.55"

[Pfui]

Deutsche Telekom, eh? Interesting. Thanks for the UA!

[incrediBILL]

I routinely use the nifty, one-word SetEnvIf User-Agent ^Example no_way, thanks, but just prefer to move from broad to narrow when first excluding any UA.

I would use a broader brush and drop the "^" from most of them too.

Why?

Because when they mutate it tends to change from:

"ExampleCrawler (http://examplecrawler.com)"

to:

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; ExampleCrawler; (http://examplecrawler.com))"

..or some such nonsense, so let the string float with the minimum user agent and you'll snare all combinations moving forward.

[Pfui]

Very good point, Bill, and I agree. It's just that as bot-watchful as I am, I still like to give more visitors than not the benefit of the doubt. And sometimes, it does matter whether those smaller string segments 'fit' -- or don't.

For example, I blocked a Boeing UA because I added EI to a

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent

array. Oops. Using ^EI (and no IfNoCase:) made sure I narrowed the focus. (Here's [webmasterworld.com] a related thread.)

Also, in the case of

^West

, blocking sans ^ would mean the visitor from the UK using --

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; West Kent College; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

-- would've been more than a bit baffled.

You and Jim and countless others are a heckuva lot more experienced and efficient with all this stuff than I am, and in the context of your belts-and-suspenders programs and bot traps and what-have-yous, you're in great shape. I'm one of those folks still doing things manually so I'm a bit slower and a lot less efficient by default.

But one of these days (famous last words!) I'm going to sit down and revamp my primary .htaccess from the get-go and clean out loads of flooby-dust...

[keyplyr]

Deutsche Telekom, eh? Interesting...

As I said earlier, this is just a suite of webmaster type tools that can be run by anyone at any IP address. The reason I ban the UA is IMO it can be used to scrape content and I have enough battles with that already.

[jdMorgan]

Pfui,

OT: I have the National SemiConductor data book with the "Flooby-dust" chapter if you need a technical reference.

Jim

[incrediBILL]

I still like to give more visitors than not the benefit of the doubt.

I give most visitors the benefit of a doubt too which is why I have a log of who I bounce so I can see if anything I've done is overly agressive.

Overall I block about 300-400 bogus sources out of 13K+ visitors/day.

Probably a few innocents snared now and then, but my blocked agent log files look pretty clean to me.

One thing I block is anything with "http://" in the agent but that's post filtering after all the allowed crawlers have been let into the site.

BTW, the "West Wind Internet Protocols" looks like it's programming tools to me, someone used their toolkit to crawl or link check. I run into this with lots of toolkits out there all the time.