About Bad Robot! | Bad Robot! Help Pages | Download Bad Robot!

Bad Robot! is an application that help's webmasters identify and ban web bots that do irritating things like post spam comments and trackbacks on blogs, harvest email addresses, ignore robots.txt, etc. It does this by analyzing web logs and allowing a webmaster to ban requests from IP addresses that host bad robots. It also supports a "white list" of IP addresses that should never be banned (useful for those times when you do something that looks like bad behavior and end up banning yourself) and a "Black list" of widely known site rippers and email harvesters, which can be banned by user agent.

Bad Robot! is still in the early stages of development. It currently only detects bad attempts to post Movable Type Trackbacks, and writes out a text file that you can paste into the.htaccess file on the server you want to protect. In the near future I will be adding other types of bad behavior to the list of things that Bad Robot! detects, and improving it's ability to automatically maintain .htaccess files without a lot of manual work. If you would like Bad Robot! to detect a particular behavior that you find irritating, let me know - since I only use Movabletype I can use help from Wordpress users and others to identify signs of bad behavior in those environments.

Bad Robot only works with the Apache Webserver, because that is what I use and can test with. It would probably not be hard to make it work with other webservers, and I welcome any suggestions for making it work with them. If you are interested in improving Bad Robot!'s functionality, let me know at edgore (at symbol) shinra.com.