Hey University of Singapore - Knock it Off

In addition to the million or so humans a month that visit RateItAll, there are also thousands of "bots" - non human visitors who crawl and scrape our site for content.

Some of these bots are benign - for example Google, Yahoo, and MSN all operate bots / spiders that are used to index our content so that it can show up in their respective search engines. These bots follow strict rules, and respond to our requests to slow down if they are hitting us too hard. We love them.

But others are rogues. Pounding our servers without regards to our requests, and scraping our (yours and RateItAll's) content so that they can display it elsewhere and try and make money off of it.

Today, one of those rogue bots was hitting pretty hard - we tracked it back to the University of Singapore. They were hitting us about twice as aggressively as Google, which is pretty aggressive.

So if you guys over there in Singapore are reading this, nice work. You overdid it and now you are permanently banned.