4 ms·

The thing is I was playing nice - responding immediately to your Twitter message, changing the rate asap. But then I come onto HN and see a complaint from you

by jdrock 17y ago

The thing is I was playing nice - responding immediately to your Twitter message, changing the rate asap. But then I come onto HN and see a complaint from you without mentioning we responded quickly. Not cool in my book. You're saying people should play nice when you're just telling one side of the story. Edit: I should note the response would have been even faster if you had emailed us from the contact page that's on the website we link to in our request header. Tweets go to us marketing/biz-dev guys. The contact form goes to everyone in the company. I'm not sure how much nicer we can be beyond doing everything we can to be reachable and identifiable.

OmarIsmail 17y ago
By the time we identified you as the problem the damage was already done. In fact, when combined with potential performance penalty that Google may apply (could be 5%, 10%, for one week, two weeks... who knows) the actual amount of damage in lost traffic/business to us could easily run into the thousands. Are you going to reimburse us the damages? Obviously not. I want you to realize that the timeliness of your response is completely irrelevant to the matter at hand. Proper net etiquette would be to have a reasonable limit of an ACTUAL 1 req/sec, not an average. Furthermore, allow only the webmaster of the site to increase the rate. Also, while nofollow sculpting is not the original intention of the metatag, MANY people use it as such, so respect that directive. Also, you can have your system be aware when a site is slow to respond and adjust crawl rates/times as necessary. Also, user-agent protections are not enough. Many webservers have built-in automatic IP-based attack detection/prevention, but as far as I know, most don't have user-agent based systems. The new virtual land is distributed and webservers have to react to that new reality, but the onus is on you to be aware that many people are still running legacy systems. If you guys did that from the beginning there wouldn't be an issue. And I'm sure all those complaints you see on other webmaster forums would largely go away as well. There are many things you can/could've done to prevent this problem. There's things we could have done as well, but placing the blame on us is akin to blaming a robbed family for not locking the door. Sure, said family should have locked the door, but that in no way excuses the robber of their actions. I know it's a lot easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, but when you're performing the equivalent of a DDoS attack and causing immediate and direct financial damages to a company... that doesn't fly.
- jdrock 17y ago
  The reason the request rate was at 4 was that at some point your site responded to 4 req/sec without problems. User-agent is the accepted and standardized way to communicate with bots. Getting angry at us for following robots.txt is like getting angry at someone for showing you her ID when she goes through airport security. From our perspective, your house put up a sign that said "Hey everyone come in 4 at a time".
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Sorry, but I think you are in some weird kind of 'damage control' mode here. First of all, one hit per second, or even 4 is ridiculously low and most other search engines crawl at a much higher rate. Second, you really should learn how to use robots.txt and what nofollow is really for. As for 80 legs, they should start caching stuff so one client crawling a page will have the effect that other clients of theirs will not be revisiting that same page for a while. If a relatively low volume crawler is already a ddos attack in your book then I hope that you will never be subjected to a real one because it will be curtains for your site in a heartbeat.

by jdrock 17y ago

OmarIsmail 17y ago

By the time we identified you as the problem the damage was already done. In fact, when combined with potential performance penalty that Google may apply (could be 5%, 10%, for one week, two weeks... who knows) the actual amount of damage in lost traffic/business to us could easily run into the thousands. Are you going to reimburse us the damages? Obviously not. I want you to realize that the timeliness of your response is completely irrelevant to the matter at hand. Proper net etiquette would be to have a reasonable limit of an ACTUAL 1 req/sec, not an average. Furthermore, allow only the webmaster of the site to increase the rate. Also, while nofollow sculpting is not the original intention of the metatag, MANY people use it as such, so respect that directive. Also, you can have your system be aware when a site is slow to respond and adjust crawl rates/times as necessary. Also, user-agent protections are not enough. Many webservers have built-in automatic IP-based attack detection/prevention, but as far as I know, most don't have user-agent based systems. The new virtual land is distributed and webservers have to react to that new reality, but the onus is on you to be aware that many people are still running legacy systems. If you guys did that from the beginning there wouldn't be an issue. And I'm sure all those complaints you see on other webmaster forums would largely go away as well. There are many things you can/could've done to prevent this problem. There's things we could have done as well, but placing the blame on us is akin to blaming a robbed family for not locking the door. Sure, said family should have locked the door, but that in no way excuses the robber of their actions. I know it's a lot easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, but when you're performing the equivalent of a DDoS attack and causing immediate and direct financial damages to a company... that doesn't fly.

jdrock 17y ago
The reason the request rate was at 4 was that at some point your site responded to 4 req/sec without problems. User-agent is the accepted and standardized way to communicate with bots. Getting angry at us for following robots.txt is like getting angry at someone for showing you her ID when she goes through airport security. From our perspective, your house put up a sign that said "Hey everyone come in 4 at a time".
jacquesm 17y ago
Sorry, but I think you are in some weird kind of 'damage control' mode here. First of all, one hit per second, or even 4 is ridiculously low and most other search engines crawl at a much higher rate. Second, you really should learn how to use robots.txt and what nofollow is really for. As for 80 legs, they should start caching stuff so one client crawling a page will have the effect that other clients of theirs will not be revisiting that same page for a while. If a relatively low volume crawler is already a ddos attack in your book then I hope that you will never be subjected to a real one because it will be curtains for your site in a heartbeat.