NYCPHP Meetup

[Steve Manes]

At 11:26 PM 3/31/2003 -0500, Hans Zaunere wrote:
>Again, negative.  The archives are only accesible after registering and
>logging in - something others have mentioned as being a pain, but at the same
>time, this is the first ever spam issue that's been reported.

I ran into this problem on a couple of my lists.  The culprit turned out to 
be unauthorized, third-party web archives.  Bots were subscribed which fed 
my lists to their archives, operated by sharks scavenging the net for 
content to wrap their advertising around.

Googling on "nyphp" reveals one site (alicebot) which has mirrored at least 
some NYPHP posts.  One of the bigger ones I found archiving my TBL list 
apparently blocked search engine 'bots so it didn't show up on the search 
engines at all.  A subscriber told me about it.  Of course, robots.txt is 
only advisory and useless against address mining robots.  They had five 
years of my digests published on their site.