WWW-Mechanize/0.72

Sneaky

[tangor]

IP 206.80.1.2nn with blank referer asked for robots.txt four times over two days.
Then came back as WWW-Mechanize/0.72 and grabbed a fairly popular section of my website direct without taking robots.txt.

Any ideas what this is?

[keyplyr]

The Search (at top of page) is your friend :)

[google.com...]

[tangor]

Did that search. This is not a PHP script with two colons, it is WWW-Mechanize with a version number appended---a UA requesting files on my site. Don't see how the above might answer my query, but I am willing to be illuminated!

(edit)

Okay... read down a little further. A kind of brain dead bot?

Anyway, thanks!

[tangor]

A little more research indicates this is a prefetch routine to strip/fill html forms. Been around since 2004 but has been updated in 2007 and seems to be getting traction. I will most likely boot this one.

[phranque]

probably based on the perl module (cpan.org).
often used for scraping or automated form submit scripts.
0.72 was the current version as of 5 years ago today (Feb 2004).

Default User Agents of Programming Libraries and Command Line Tools [webmasterworld.com]

[tangor]

Fortunately I don't have too many forms these days (got weary fighting the spammers), but this critter, this time, took content that has no forms which was the reason for my original query. Either way, the UA does not appear to be a valid human visitor...and won't send anyone to me, so Adios!