I had the MJ12 bot blocked, as you may remember. Being an optimistic sort of IT idiot, though, I decided to take the block off for a little while after I’d made some tweaks to the Gazette’s redirect system – that’s the thing that punts you to the Stories on AO3 page if you try to hit an old Campfire link – to see if MJ12 bot would learn better from that. It did not, and I got sick of seeing it clogging up my site stats every day, so I blocked it again with even more spider-cutting sarcasm in the comment field than I’d used before. That was roughly ten days ago, and in those ten days MJ12 bot has tried to hit this site over a thousand times. Yes, really. 1022 attempted hits to a site that’s barely a year old, only has 115 posts and five pages up, and isn’t at all full of bot-attracting high-traffic keywords or slick viral content. I believe you can see why I was annoyed? Of course you can. I don’t think MJ12 bot can, though, so I decided to offer it some tough-love:
Dear MJ12 bot:
You seem to like visiting my site a lot – yes, 1022 visits in 10 days is a lot, dear, really it is – so I thought perhaps I needed to have a talk with you. Because in spite of what you’ve been told, persistence is not always a virtue. ‘Building a distributed search engine’ is your supposed raison d’être, but you’ve been at that since 2007, by my count, and said engine still doesn’t appear to exist. It isn’t happening, you are not going to dethrone Google anywhere but in your own minds, okay? You wanted to do that, I know, but now you are a company that gathers, compiles and sells other people’s site data, so please just own that and stop claiming it’s only a means to an end because you have a Clever Plan. Even if you did have a clever plan once, there’s no way it’s still clever enough to defeat the monstrous tentacled Elder God Google has morphed into since then and you know it.
I’m only trying to help you, MJ12 bot. I removed all of the profanity from this letter before posting it so you would know that. And I uploaded a motivational poster for you, too!
Love and Kisses,
Goth Kitty Lady
a.k.a. that insignificant blogger whose site you hit 1022 times in 10 days
