today's betaBot

[lucy24]

Anyone know anything?

212.232.24.2 - - [03/Oct/2015:13:58:33 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 647 "-" "betaBot" 

It's always that identical IP, down to the last digit; free lookup suggests they really do own the IP (within a hosting range).

:: pause here for double-take and gasp of horror as I pull up second site's processed logs and realize that, in spite of repeated robots.txt requests, they've blithely requested pages from a roboted-out directory (can't think why I missed that earlier) ::

The betaBot mentioned in this thread from 2008
[webmasterworld.com...]
may well be the same entity-- they're both Austrian-- but no further information. But where have they been for the last seven years?

:: further detour to raw logs to confirm that I've never seen them in my life*, with corollary discovery that although database says the range is blocked from way back, I seem to have forgotten to, er, actually block it ::


* For logging purposes, my life began early in 2011.

[topr8]

they've requested robots.txt on several of our sites in the last fe days, coming from the same ip as your one each time.

[keyplyr]

free lookup suggests they really do own the IP (within a hosting range).

Probably more correct to say "lease" rather than "own." Neither do we own our TLDs. If we don't pay the yearly (lease) fees, they are offered up to someone that will. I think the misnomer comes from the hyperbole of "purchasing" a domain, or from the hosting companies "selling" us an IP range, which of course they don't really do since they don't really own them either.

I concur betabot does not support/obey robots.txt. Banned it back then... still banned now. Could of course be a different bot. I mean, betabot? Not that innovative :)

The betaBot mentioned in this thread from 2008
[webmasterworld.com...]

[lucy24]

Heh. I just meant "own" as in "It's theirs exclusively" as opposed to "567 websites use this address". Similarly, this is my apartment even if I don't own the building.

http://blahblah

Well, that was fun. Somehow a <blockquote> sneaked into your quoted URL-- but all is good, because I hadn't seen WebmasterWorld's 404 page in a quite a while :) Someone must have enjoyed designing that.

[keyplyr]

That's strange, I also had trouble quoting your quote. Sometimes I got the archived thread page from 2008 and sometimes I got the WW 404 page. The blockquote also kept sucking in other text that wasn't inside the tags. Took several attempts to make it all work. No doubt incrediBILL's twisted sense of humor.

Tell us more about your apartment :)