Oi, robot!
In recent days, ridey.net has been hammered by a very aggressive robot called Pompos, from a French search engine called dir.com. It would come in, and rifle through the entire site, sucking up lots of bandwidth. So I’ve banned them via robots.txt. Not sure why it took such an interest in ridey.net.
While looking at the server logs (something I hadn’t done for a while), I also noticed another French visitor called Torpedo had been hijacking an image from an old blog entry. That is to say, they were linking to the image file on ridey.net, thus every time someone looked at their site it would pull in the image from mine, in effect stealing my bandwith. Not acceptable! So we did a little Photoshop work and now visitors to Monsieur Torpedo’s blog will have a little surprise.
August 23rd, 2004 19:03
Cool! Nice work I must say! Too bad the link from Mr. T’s blog still goes to your old blog picture though. Not sure why that is.
August 27th, 2004 19:15
I had a similar problem last year, my jpegs were being hotlinked to and it was chewing up bandwidth, so I wrote a .htaccess file onto my server blocking hotlinking to all gifs and jpegs - it did the trick.