Bingbot

[Ben Bullock]

Bingbot has been accessing www.sljfaq.org/e2k/e2k.cgi with by 4pm today around 280,000 accesses out of 390,000 total today, sending huge amounts of words into the English to Katakana converter. I've had to block the bot from the site.

I don't know what has been happening at all, it looks very odd but the IP address is actually a Microsoft one. It might be some miscreant using the Microsoft servers rather than the real Bingbot, anyway I hope so.

[Ben Bullock]

Looking further through the logs, the bingbot and various other "bots" are also bombarding the romaji to kana converter with mountains of text. Unlike the English to katakana converter, the romaji system is a simple application of publicly available open source software, so this is a fairly extraordinary bit of misuse of my website. There has never been any blocking of overuse on that system but I've now had to add it to the binary.

For the time being, I have added bingbot to robots.txt and also blocked the IP address 157.55.39.54 where the requests were coming from.

[Ben Bullock]

I've had to block huge numbers of Microsoft IP addresses since they kept trying to access it from more and more different addresses, ignoring the 403 Forbidden status and also ignoring robots.txt. These blocks will probably continue into the future unfortunately which may affect people who use Bing for searches. Since I've been fiddling with the website, I'm going to take the time to update the realm of the website which means a short downtime. Apologies to those affected.