renlifangbot

MSN China

[keyplyr]

219.142.53.** - - [06/Mar/2009:02:00:25 -0700] "GET www.example.com/robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 3932 "-" "renlifangbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

[dstiles]

IP claims to be MS China. Any idea what the word means? At least it's asking for robots.txt, a strange thing for a chinese bot to do, surely?

[thetrasher]

Any idea what the word means?

EntityCube

[dstiles]

Ok, now I've found it. Not sure I like its implications. Why send out yet another bot instead of parsing their search engine?

Oooh! I know this one! It's because team A won't play nicely with team B who in any case want to play with their own new toys!

[GaryK]

This one visited me last week from the same IP Address. It hit all my sites requesting only robots.txt and then leaving.

I wonder if I should include this in my list of msnbot-related crawlers? Is this something you'd like to see identified as being related to msnbot?

[blend27]

-- EntityCube --
This is from their page: "we first use a classifier to decide whether it is a product page"

It all sounds spiffy!

But, How about simply complying with Robots.txt

User-agent: renlifangbot
Disallow: /

Means, I don’t want you there.

Is it still so hard to understand? or did I misspell "Disallow"?

<CFsleep type="afterLunch"><CFdrool active="true" /></CFsleep>.

[GaryK]

It's another bot from MSN so it doesn't have to obey the rules. ;)

[blend27]

-- it doesn't have --

Well, just for the "it doesn't have" sake i tried serving it a 2 liner

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

in robots.txt file, the rest of of was blank. Takes the file and completely ignores it. Tries to grab not just a home page but deep pages in the site that it has never ever had a chance to find a link to on my site(due to no content served to it at any time), nor from any other site on the net. That confirms that MSNBots share URL Data between each other somehow or URL Data is found else where, perhaps user visits to the site.

But That is it for me. Big X.

[Pfui]

FWIW, here's info about MSN's bots vis-a-vis their new Bing.com (née Live.com): Bing user agent? [webmasterworld.com]