Gigabot UA change?

dropped versioning

[jdMorgan]

Seen this morning:

66.154.102.225 - - [22/Jun/2006:04:32:29 -0400] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 10205 "-" "Gigabot"

Previous versions have included a version number, so this one fell into a trap when it tried to fetch an allowed file -- because somebody changed the User-agent string (bad idea).

IP resolves to Gigabot, so AFAIK, it's legit.

Jim

[GaryK]

I have been under the apparent mistaken assumption that Gigabot crawled
from IP Addresses hosted by Hurricane Electric, hence it's been banned. My information is rather old though. What's the general attitude about this bot? Do you let it crawl your sites? Thanks.

[Pfui]

I don't. (Big surprise:)

Alas, poor you, Garyk. In a protracted discussion about this bot [webmasterworld.com] about six months ago, you asked the same Q [webmasterworld.com]. HE certainly is home to more than enough pests and troublemakers (and nice users, too!), and Gigablast's Gigabot may have been run/tested from someone hosted on one of HE's gazillion IPs (which I don't happene to block whole hog).

But I don't care who's running Gigabot -- and anybody can [webmasterworld.com] -- it's on my Do Not Admit list.

[Pfui]

(Aside: The #msg 'suffixes' in the [url] tags don't appear to be sending people to the individually designated posts. The # is converting to %23 and not working. So if you change the %23 to # in your location bar, you'll end up at the individual posts.)

[GaryK]

Too true Pfui. Look for a sticky from me so we can keep this thread on topic.