Slashers

wondering about site slashers

[Megaclinium]

I guess I call these things 'slashers' as they just request the / page of my site (resolves to index.html), but I really don't know what they are or why they are doing this.

The funny thing is sometimes doesn't ask for the graphic items that are on the home page,

and sometimes these guys seem to ask for subdirectories (without the N=D thing) but then don't ask for the full page itself.

Are these just directory mapping robots or something?

I've seen them also get the HTML pages but leave off ANY jpegs graphics. Perhaps copyright searching bots or something?

Maybe I should call theu 'DUey' as in directory users.
I already call the heavy users 'HUeys', so now I just need to figure out who to call 'Luey' (Loser Users :)

- maybe for those who point bots at my site without UA and get banned or the particulary stupid bot herders who create a bunch of 404 errors that get me to notice them in the first place.

Then with Huey, DUeys and LUeys I'd have all my ducks in a row?

Sorry about off on a tangent, I really was wondering what the /ing is doing.

[venti]

A bot of some sort and possibly a scraper bot. Any decent sized size will get dozens of these a day. There are numerous ways to combat this. Do a search here on WebmasterWorld for scrapers or scraper bots. Incredibill posts good ideas that we have implemented that have removed nearly all these requests.

[incrediBILL]

I've seen a lot of things that just load a single page and not all of them are bad.

Often link checkers just hit the home page for instance, or sites monitoring for page changes, or every now and then something installed in a browser goes nuts and asks for the home page over and over for no reason.

There are just as many things that hit the home page that I would block, but without knowing the specific user agents it would be a tough call.