YahooSeeker is crashing my site

Anyway to stop this without blocking it

[itisgene]

I got hundreds of slurp visits to my some of the database driven forums.
I had to restart the forums because of the crashes.
Is there any way that I can prevent this without using robots.txt? The forum uses only one main file to show the forum, say widgets.asp with all the parameters after question mark. (widgets.asp?forumID=1&category=7)
SO, If I block widgets.asp in robots.txt, it will block the whole forum including the main page.

Is this YahooSeeker different from normal Slurp?

We are #3 to #8 for two word keywords with these forums on Yahoo and MSN and I don't want to lose the listing.

Any advice?
Thanks,

Server Variables:
-----------------
ALL_HTTP = HTTP_ACCEPT:*/* HTTP_HOST:www.MYSITE.com HTTP_USER_AGENT:YahooSeeker/1.1 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5;
htt*://help.yahoo.com/help/us/shop/merchant/) HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE:Sat, 21 Feb 2004 18:15:16 GMT HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING:gzip, x-gzip HTTP_FROM:[e-mail]
ALL_RAW = Accept: */*
Host: www.MYSITE.com
User-Agent: YahooSeeker/1.1 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; htt*://help.yahoo.com/help/us/shop/merchant/)
If-Modified-Since: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 18:15:16 GMT
Accept-Encoding: gzip, x-gzip
From: [e-mail]

[itisgene]

Wow,
I just looked at the Yahoo shopping area and Yahoo Shopping is selling our terms of services at $7.96!

We had an advertisement from another website on our web sites and Yahoo Shopping (YahooSeeker) thinks we are selling something at $7.96.

Can I just block this YahooSeeker and not the normal slurp?

[gkrishnan]

hi,

YahooSeeker is used as the user-agent for crawling
only for yahoo's vertical searches such as shopping.
Disabling/blocking YahooSeeker will not affect your
websearch rankings. So, in that sense YahooSeeker
is different from slurp.

[help.yahoo.com...]

To specifically prevent Yahoo! from crawling your site, you can add these lines to the /robots.txt file on your server:

User-agent: YahooSeeker
Disallow: /

[Rumbas]

In Tim's Pubcon presentation he mentioned a robots.txt syntax you could use to slow the regular crawler down. I found that kind of neat, but don't remember the right robots.txt command.

Anybody remeber the correct syntax?

It might work on YahooSeeker too..

[bcolflesh]

[help.yahoo.com...]

[itisgene]

Thanks, guys.
I will use robots.txt

User-agent: YahooSeeker
Disallow: /

as gkrishnan suggested.

We don't sell anything, so nothing to lose.
We just need to be listed in Yahoo natural results.

Thanks,