To anyone who may have got caught up in the flak after I posted about the MSNBot, my apologies. Admittedly I shouldn't perhaps have been so emotional about it, but what is done is done.
However, it seems that although I may have initiated the discussion, we are far from being the only ones suffering from the effects. I have had email comments and seen comments on a few of the IT news sites, where people have witnessed similar behaviour. One interestingly posted a link that perhaps explains why we got hit: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/01/microsoft-outlines-plan-to-improve-bings-slow-indexing.ars I have had an apology from the Bing representative, and I've said that I will only remove the ban once I see evidence that the bot is being more responsible. I have only banned it from www.cpantesters.org, all the other sites are unaffected. The reduction in HTTP traffic though has been dramatic. I'll post more if I hear anything more from the Bing team. Cheers, Barbie. -- Birmingham Perl Mongers <http://birmingham.pm.org> Memoirs Of A Roadie <http://barbie.missbarbell.co.uk> CPAN Testers Blog <http://blog.cpantesters.org> YAPC Conference Surveys <http://yapc-surveys.org>
