Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Botslist.com Goes Beta

After several months of development and testing, Botslist.com has been opened for testing by the general public. The development took much longer than anticipated but I believe the effort has been worthwhile because the site is hands-down one of the most comprehensve and sophisticated bot tracking services on the internet. That in itself would be saying nothing, of course, if it wasn't for the pain and agony that bad bots are causing many website owners like myself.

There are those who think bots should be allowed to roam and plunder websites as they like but I beg to differ. The bots were becoming an issue on my sites and I wasn't about to take it lying down. Since I could code my way out of the proverbial box, I felt it was time to do something about the problem. I had a solution in place not before long and the solution worked pretty well as designed. But something was amiss.

It didn't take long for me to figure out what was missing. I had a pretty good solution to the bot problem and as an aspiring MicroISV I was always on the lookout for ways to help people solve problems with software. So naturally it occured to me that with some additional effort, I could offer my bot solution to other website operators who are having headaches from bad bots and are willing to do something about the problem.

But I wasn't about to invest months of development time into a solution without doing some minimal market research first. So off I went to my favourite search engines to see what people were doing to solve their bot problem. Since I already had my own solution in place, I knew exactly what I was looking for.

It wasn't CrawlWall, which appears to be in beta since late 2006. It wasn't BotSense, which appears to be abandoned. It wasn't AntiCrawl, which appears to be something out of the outer MLM world. It wasn't AntiLeech, which appears to work with WordPress only, and in any case I wasn't prepared to deploy PHP and MySQL on my server. What I was looking for is something close to my own solution because I was convinced that this was the best --- and maybe even the only viable --- solution to the bot problem.

Now if my conviction was accurate, then I would expect someone else on the internet to have had a hint of the solution by now. Without this additional confirmation that my solution is an idea whose time has come, I wasn't going to put too much time into offering the solution to others as a service. But then I came across this post by Kjell Gunnar Bleivik in which he basically outlines the essential components of the proposed solution. That was all the confirmation I needed. Time to get my hands dirty with some coding.

It's almost done now - thank goodness. The major components are all in place and working as designed. There are a few points of detail where my solution differs from the one described by Kjell Gunnar Bleivik, but that was to be expected. For instance, I believe strongly that human nature would cripple a system based on donation, so instead I offer both a free service and a paid service to help fund the system. I believe also that a system that requires a massive hidden network would eventually fail, so instead I invite website operators who are already running bot detection scripts to redirect their bad bots to nonexisting urls on botslist.com which would automatically register the bots into the botslist database.

There is a lot of exciting technologies involved in botslist.com and I intend to describe some of these in future posts. I'm tempted to go on and on right here but this post is long enough as it is and you, my dearly beloved reader, probably have something else to do. So I will leave the rest till next month. Enjoy.

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