EverbeeCrawler

Yet another stupid bot that caught my attention: EverbeeCrawler. Now, what's wrong with this request?

213.251.151.102 - - [05/Oct/2005:03:28:20 -0400] "GET /forum/viewtopic.php%253%3?forum%253%3=12%26showtopic%253%3=57796 HTTP/1.1" 400 227 "http://www.geeklog.net:80/forum/" "EverbeeCrawler"

I have no idea what the %253%3 (or the 12%26, for that matter) is supposed to mean or even where it's coming from - certainly not from a link on our site. Also notice the 400 HTTP response code - this broken request caused our webserver to barf. Stupid bot ...

Originally, I noticed this bot because of its tendency to add ":80" to its referrers (as can be seen in the request above). Besides, the actual idea of using referrers (from external sites) is a bad one for a bot.

I've put it in our robots.txt. It took a while, but it did catch on eventually - it's only requesting the robots.txt and nothing else now.

Interestingly enough, you can't find much about that bot on the web. Only lots of sightings in other people's referrer stats (why are those openly on the web, btw?). The IP address (also: 213.251.151.103) belongs to an outfit called "Everbee Networks", located in France, and related to OVH (ovh.net, ovh.com). OVH seems to be a hoster so maybe Everbee Networks is one of their customers.