Wikipedia:Spiders and bots policy
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Search engine spiders
[edit]A huge portion of our traffic comes from referrals from search engines. Obviously, we want search engines to spider over the site and index us! These spiders are usually well-behaved; they take their time, obey the robots.txt file, and don't stress the server too much.
Other spiders
[edit]Other well-behaved spiders are also welcome.
But from time to time spiders are not friendly -- they don't obey the restrictions in robots.txt and overuse database-stressing dynamic functions, and/or request pages at so great a rate that they're preventing legitimate human users from getting at the database. If a spider is found to be causing that kind of trouble, the IP address will be banned from access to the site. Currently so banned are:
- 144.167.21.15
- 192.153.22.246
- 202.69.76.19
- 212.27.33.00/24
- 24.130.248.43
- 194.209.152.200
- 80.192.68.91
- 80.2.170.93
- 209.208.186.2
- 68.62.88.211
- 203.175.70.118
- 65.60.161.156
- 81.86.203.137
- 63.164.242.215
- 66.147.154.3
- 62.101.126.224
- 209.125.45.130
- 172.189.3.245
- 61.30.127.4
- 61.30.14.26
- 137.230.1.11
- 194.228.168.42
(These don't show up in Special:Ipblocklist, which blocks IPs from saving edits to the wiki.)
Bots that make edits to the wiki
[edit]Well-behaved bots are acceptable under some circumstances. Please see Wikipedia:Bots.