I’ve been studying my site’s access logs, I’m nearly going blind with it.  But at least I know a lot more about who (what) I need to keep outta here.  There are a lot of search-engine bots that seem to be minding their manners and wearing proper name-tags (like Googlebot, and all the blog-related search engines). They’re behaving nicely and sending lots of traffic in return. But there are others that are just ramming through my site grabbing everything they can find, and sending me no new visitors. I’m working on a list of the worst offenders now, and later this evening I’m going to be uploading an htaccess file to my site in order block out the baddies.  I wanted to give y’all a little bit of warning so you’ll know what’s happening, in case I screw up and block out any legitimate visitors.  You people are fine!  If it were just for you, the fans and the friends and the normal blog-readers and miscellaneous visitors, there wouldn’t be any problem.


It looks like at least 25-50% of the traffic I’m getting is of the non-human variety. You name it, I’ve got it… there are robots (or just idiots) trying to download my entire site or my entire image library, which is huge. There are hackers trying different URLs looking for a FrontPage file they can use to gain access to my system, and/or a version of FormMail they can use for spamming.  People trying to get into my Movable Type install and my webmail.  Media hogs usings automated tools to find and steal my pictures, movies and sound files without even visiting a single one of my pages. I’ve got e-mail scrapers, and robots from Cyveillance (RIAA/MPAA), NameProtect ("online brand monitoring"), and Turnitin, which is a service teachers use to detect plaigarized material in their students’ homework.  Looks like I’ve got ‘em crawling all over me like cockroaches.  And I just hate that.  Something’s gotta be done.  Get them off me!!  EX-TER-MEEE-NATE!!

I’m going to be making my rules a little more strict than I probably need to. I’m going to wait and see if anyone complains, and then relax the rules as necessary.  But normal people (like you) shouldn’t be affected by this at all.  If you are, there’s a problem! So if you find you can’t access my pages tomorrow, or if you have some legitimate tool you’d like to use on my site that won’t work anymore, please comment here if you can, or e-mail me — use my first name at spamcop dot net.  My first name is at the top of this page, in case you don’t know it already. (smile)