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Newbie/Basic Questions

What is a Rule Breaker?

Author: A.E4 (16 Jun 09 4:53pm)

I was looking at an IP that visited my site and PHP said it was a Rule Breaker. I had not seen that definition before. What does that mean?

I was looking here: http://www.projecthoneypot.org/faq.php#a

But can't find anything on Rule Breakers..

I would like more info thanks.

Re: What is a Rule Breaker?

Author: M.Prince (16 Jun 09 11:49pm)

New feature we're working on. Not quite ready for prime time, but it's basically a robot that disobeys robots.txt or other standard rules of good bot behavior. We'll put more information about them online shortly.

Re: What is a Rule Breaker?

Author: M.Deppe (18 Dec 09 2:16pm)

Any update on this? I'm curious ;)

Re: What is a Rule Breaker?

Author: M.Prince (23 Dec 09 6:52pm)

We have continued to track so-called rule breakers. These are bots that violate robots.txt or other crawling rules. In order to support tracking of rule breaking bots we need to have control of robots.txt. We have a select number of full domains we control. On these we've implemented a system where we add trap URLs to robots.txt and watch what happens. If this test proves useful at adding information to Project Honey Pot's dataset then we'll find ways to expand the test to more domains.

Re: What is a Rule Breaker?

Author: B.L5 (2 Jan 10 9:47am)

Is there any way I can participate in this?

Re: What is a Rule Breaker?

Author: B.Kenobi (6 May 14 6:52am)

Well... you may start setting up some traps, it's easy and won't cost you a single penny, then you may go further and donate a (sub)domain; that's slightly more complex but will greatly help catching bots; also, use the Http::BL for your sites, that way you will keep bad hosts home and, at the same time, your contributions to the project will also contribute keeping those bad critters away from your sites; not bad, I think :)