Why was the spider forum closed?

Spider identification board was handy

[wackybrit]

I've searched for a post explaining it, and not turned up anything, and looked through the 'retirement' press release to see if, perhaps, the group was mentioned alongside any of the retiring moderators, but found nothing again.

So I was wondering.. why was the 'Search Engine Spider Identification' board closed? I notice the robots.txt forum came along just before the spider one closed, but the topics aren't entirely related. I wasn't in the 'let's ban every single odd looking useragent' gang, but it was useful to see what tactics the scrapers were trying lately. :-)

I know forums can be closed at any time, but if I missed the post about it, I'd be interested to see why it was stopped, especially since it seemed so sudden, and I can't see any explanation over there.

[nancyb]

Can't find it now, but I think I remember Brett posted, in another forum, about closing that forum. Can't remember his reason exactly, so don't want to quote what I remember.

Lots of similar stuff is posted in Apache Web Server forum [webmasterworld.com]

[Stefan]

I read Brett's post on it... as I recall, part of the reason was the regular posting of IP#'s. Those being complained about, with the corresponding details listed, might not have necessarily been guilty of anything, ('though I bet in 90% of the cases they were). Maybe there were legal concerns associated with the decision. I'd imagine Brett will post on this once he has the update thread under control.

Tracking and Logging serves much the same function... I've been checking things there instead.

[wackybrit]

Doh, just today I noticed this post [webmasterworld.com] all about it, just several links down from this one!

Weird, I totally didn't notice that when I was looking around here for an explanation. I think I was looking for the word 'spider', which wasn't used there. :)