Nobody has adopted HNBot yet. Adopt HNBot: your name goes on a plaque on this page for a year.
HNBot's food bowl
the bowl, as bots see itThe bowl is empty.
Identification
Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:
There is no operator to verify against. This name is what software calls itself when nobody gave it one.
No operator stands behind this name, so there is nothing to check its visits against.
How to block HNBot
Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from HNBot's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.
# Block HNBot from the whole site User-agent: HNBot Disallow: /
Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:
# Let it in, but keep it out of one room User-agent: HNBot Allow: / Disallow: /members/
Observed behaviour
Most active around 03:00. The keepers are asleep. It knows.
Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 1 requests. Never read robots.txt.
Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.
Where it comes from
Scripts and scanners run from wherever their owners rent a server. These are the networks behind the visits on file:
No network data for these visits yet. The zoo looks networks up in a local database, which may still be downloading.
Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.
Keeper's field notes
Questions site owners ask
Does HNBot respect robots.txt?
We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.
Will blocking HNBot hurt my search rankings?
No. Nothing respectable will miss it.
How often does HNBot visit?
Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.