While perusing my apache logs, I ran across a lot of requests from a bot with the user-agent of “ShablastBot 1.0” and all came from the IP address of 67.228.100.141. Reverse IP shows that 67.228.100.138 67.228.100.139 67.228.100.140
and 67.228.100.142 also resolve to shablast.com. One significant problem appears to be it doesn’t correctly parse out feed: URLs, so I have dozens of bad requests for things like “HEAD /2008/02/feed:http:/www.example.com/feed”
The other major problem is it sent out many many requests in a very short amount of time. Luckily, the server throttled the connections before any damage could be done. But for now I’ve blocked both the ShaBlastBot user-agent and the known IP addresses of that agent from my server.
There isn’t any obvious way to contact any one at ShaBlast about the problems, although I did leave a comment on the site’s blog.
I’ve found the same – quite a few errors being generated by wrongly parsed URLs. I’ve blocked it too. Any idea if it recognises robots.txt. Not much on their web site, and your comment doesn’t seem to have made it onto their blog.
Well, it requested the robots.txt file, but no idea what it is looking for. And you’re right, my comment wasn’t posted.
Also shows up frequently on my servers. Eats 403s. Thankfully only does HEAD requests to anything except the robots.txt so the 403s take less bandwidth (woot!). 🙂
Also got hammered by Shablast – no bot page on their website (in fact not much there at all), so I’ve blocked the user-agent too.