Is anyone else being affected by flatlens.com?

sarahseddon · #1 (**permalink**) 05-31-2006, 11:26 AM

for the last month we haved been targetted/spammed hourly by an IP address range from 64.124.140.150.0 through to 4. We have traced these back to a company called Flatlens. When you go to their website, it says its under construction. So far nearly 19,000 pages have been targetted this month. It is almost as if they are trying to bring down the site - we've emailed them to say we want them to stop, but nothing's happened so far. Because they are all over the site all the time, it is starting to affect the speed.

I just wondered if anyone else has been affected and if anyone has any suggestions?

Thanks

Burf.com · #2 (**permalink**) 06-03-2006, 06:51 PM

I checked my logs and I have not been attacked by them yet, are you sure its not soem robot they have. What about checking old versions of the site to see what they do?

newsblaze · #3 (**permalink**) 06-18-2006, 03:40 AM

That IP has never attacked the newspaper.

Check to see if it calls the robots.txt file.
If it does, then you can do this in there, if you can find the name of the robot:

User-agent: flatlens
Crawl-delay: 10

or

User-agent: flatlens
Disallow /

If you can't work out what the crawler is called, post the call here and someone might know it.

You can do this with all well-behaved crawlers.
the newspaper was being hammered by many robots at the same time, so now they all have a 2 second delay.
(some of them were calling 10 times per second).

Robots that never seem to give any traffic back, like the becomebot, have been banned altogether.

I will probably shorten the delay to 1 second otherwise their crawl cycle may never finish.

cyanide · #4 (**permalink**) 07-21-2006, 07:52 AM

That's a heck of alot of pages.
I would be tempted to just ban the ip altogether.

If you're sitting on apache, put the following in an htaccess file

Code:

<Limit GET POST>
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from 64.124.140.150
deny from 64.124.140.151
</Limit>

cyanide · #5 (**permalink**) 07-21-2006, 07:57 AM

Apparently , it does obey the robots.txt file.
Here's more info on this bot
http://fatlens.com/main/fatbot.php

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