Does anyone know anything about the "Website Stripper" robot?

I have recently noticed a lot of hits from it?

Is this something that should be banned in the robots.txt file?

Thanks,

JF

Sonds like you should block it to me. You might also want to use Apache as I bet that program ignores robots.txt.

Thanks. I think I have blocked it, but I am not sure what the exact agent name is. I just used "Web Stripper" in my robots.txt.

Yes, you should definitely block it.
You should make sure that having inserted it into your robots.txt, it actually obeys it.
If not, then you'll have to look into setting up some type of bot blocking scheme using Apache like stymiee suggested

Well, I believe it is just a robot that strips e-mail addresses and / or website URL to be later used in spam advertising. I just wonder why this machine is disguised so badly to declare itself in the logs as a user-agent!

If it is so, than robots.txt won't probably help much... Imagine an e-mail harvster that obeys robots.txt

So you should use Apache to ban evil bots. WebmasterWorld forums have a couple of threads devoted to how you can do it using your .htaccess files, e.g. this one:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/340.htm

You can also google for ".htaccess ban bots deny allow directives" or similar.

Hope this helps.

From some 20 mins on google, it seems that this is a website downloader. Bascially it allows whoever is using it to download your entire website to their hard drive for whatever reason. (Probably not good)

I doubt that the robots.txt file is going to do much good, as I'd be surprised if it follows it.

You won't be able to ban it by IP because the IP will whatever home PC is running it, but you can certainly try, however you might end up banning a lot of people (for example, when a shared IP is used like AOL).

That leaves you banning it by user-agent name, that would probably be your best bet. Banning every user agent with the word stipper in it would probably be an even better idea.

Correct. That's also exactly what I would do, deny visits from the user-agent that contains "stripper" in its name. Remember .htaccess is case-sensitive on Unix and you would probably have to account for at least most probable variants, e.g.:

Stripper
stripper
STRIPPER
stripper