Monday, October 13, 2008

Possibly Slowest Scraper Ever

I've seen slow scrapers before but this is fucking ridiculous.

80.197.39.182 has been automatically challenged to answer now 227 times since 09/23/2008 and it just keeps plugging along slow enough to be off the radar of most webmasters but just fast enough it keeps nudging my bot blocker once a day to keep tracking it.

The user agent claims to be Firefox 3:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; da; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1
Which could indicate someone making screen shots.

No clue what they're really doing but it's going really slow and they're getting pages of garbage instead of what they want, so I hope they're having a real good time fucking with my bot blocker.