I just spent a few hours channeling my frustrations with the world by taking it out on the bad robots.  Finally got a GOOD spider trap working, to automatically ban misbehaving spiders.  I used to have to do it manually after being e-mailed by the old trap-script, and by that time it was usually too late.  Now it does the banning for me, instantly.  It’ll only ban the ones that access the trap, which doesn’t happen all that often.  But maybe that was because of the warning page which had ‘THIS IS A SPIDER TRAP!!’ in big letters.  The rude robots would see that page and usually they’d leave, not following the link to the old trap script I had, which was a php file.  The new one is a perl script — the famous trap.pl at WebmasterWorld. And I’m using mod-rewrites trick to disguise its scriptiness, too.  Heheh.  It was fun to do and I really do feel better. :-) I have to get some sleep now, the sun’s coming up… if I screwed anything up, I’ll fix it if I have to, no big whoop.

Note to the curious: Do NOT go looking for my trap unless you really don’t want to come back here again!  I am serious!! But if you’re a webmaster wanting to do this for your own site, just search WMW for ‘trap.pl’ and you’ll find the instructions.