[ic] Robots

[DB]

> Hello, Interchange enthusiasts!
> 
> Today I got a report about a customer who wasn't able to order in an
> Interchange store.
> 
> It turned out that the user had the Ask toolbar installed and the robots.cfg
> wasn't up-to-date, so the session was dropped.
> 
> You probably agree with me that preventing orders is really a
> bad thing.
> 
> Recognition of robots by examining the UserAgent string is of course error
> prone and false positives are possible.
> 
> Robots who successfully login to an Interchange store are unlikely to exist.
> In this case Interchange should loudly scream into the logfiles about that
> and leave an useful error message for the user.
> 
> Also Kevin Walsh used to manage the default settings in robots.cfg, but he
> is not available anymore. Anyone else who would manage this task?
> 
> Regards
>           Racke
> 
> -- 
> LinuXia Systems => http://www.linuxia.de/
> Expert Interchange Consulting and System Administration
> ICDEVGROUP => http://www.icdevgroup.org/
> Interchange Development Team

Hi - just for fun I visited
http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml#8 which says that
Ask's current spider reports itself as

User-Agent: Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma)


I do see such entires in my sites access log, but my current robots.cfg
appears to have no such entry. Perhaps someone who is able should make
that change?

DB