Stupid 'bots
Mar. 4th, 2010 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nlbarberI'm the webmaster for a couple or three smallish areas on my agency's web pages. I've kept the default server setting to kick out an automatic email to me every time someone gets a 404 error--it's good practice, as you can see if the problem is in your page coding, or was just a user mistyping the URL.
But then there are the 'bots. Web crawlers, whatever. When they start working their way through your pages and use some wild card that your server doesn't understand, you may get an email for every page on your site. And thus tonight, when I thought I'd quickly pop into my work email to dig out a meeting time to put it on my calendar, I arrived in the midst of an email storm. There were only 10 messages when I started the email client, but in less than 20 minutes, about 700 total messages arrived.
Worse yet, it appeared to be an internal 'bot....I refrained from trying to figure out exactly whose workstation that was, lest I be tempted to call and scream at them.
But then there are the 'bots. Web crawlers, whatever. When they start working their way through your pages and use some wild card that your server doesn't understand, you may get an email for every page on your site. And thus tonight, when I thought I'd quickly pop into my work email to dig out a meeting time to put it on my calendar, I arrived in the midst of an email storm. There were only 10 messages when I started the email client, but in less than 20 minutes, about 700 total messages arrived.
Worse yet, it appeared to be an internal 'bot....I refrained from trying to figure out exactly whose workstation that was, lest I be tempted to call and scream at them.