Vol. I · Mon, 5 Oct 2026Open 24 hours · Feeding: continuous · Please do not tap the glassPatrons☕ Keepers' coffee
Plate DCXXIX0x1C14DB4DUNREAD
Kingdom Automata›Phylum HTTP›Order Scanners›Family Unidentified›Species Ruby
Specimen file · The Feral Pit

Ruby

Incertae sedis

What is Ruby?

A self-declared bot that is not in the keepers' catalogue yet. It calls itself “Ruby”. It is operated by Unknown and identifies itself as Ruby.

Temperament: unknown. Recently arrived. The keepers are still taking notes.

Operator
Unknown
Conservation status
Has not read the rules
First seen
4 Oct 2026
Last seen
3 h ago
Visits today
8
This week
14
All time
14
Caught in the trap
Never

Nobody has adopted Ruby yet. Adopt Ruby: your name goes on a plaque on this page for a year.

Ruby's food bowl

the bowl, as bots see it

The bowl is empty.

5 of 5 tokens left today
§ I.

Identification

Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:

User-Agent
$ Ruby

There is no operator to verify against. This name is what software calls itself when nobody gave it one.

Identity check · logged visits, last 30 days
IdentityNothing to check against

No operator stands behind this name, so there is nothing to check its visits against.

§ II.

How to block Ruby

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 Ruby's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.

robots.txt
# Block Ruby from the whole site
User-agent: Ruby
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: Ruby
Allow: /
Disallow: /members/
§ III.

Observed behaviour

Visits, last 30 dayspeak 8 / day
6 Sept 2026today
Diet · pages most often eaten
/7
/og/home.png2
/og/trap.png1
/og/page/guide.png1
/og/page/feed-the-bots.png1
Visiting hours
00h – 11h12h – 23h

Most active around 13:00. Office hours, like a professional.

robots.txt compliance
100.0%

Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 14 requests. Never read robots.txt.

Trap Room record
Clean

Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.

§ IV.

Where it comes from

Scripts and scanners run from wherever their owners rent a server. These are the networks behind the visits on file:

Networks · 3 on file, last 30 days
Amazon.com, Inc. AS1461864%
Amazon.com, Inc. AS1650921%
OVH SAS AS1627614%
Countries
United States US86%
France FR14%

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.

§ V.

Keeper's field notes

5 Oct 202614:10. Arrived without announcement. Consumed / and /og/bots/youbot.png. Departed.
5 Oct 2026Visited 8 times in a single day. Keeper unable to establish why.
4 Oct 2026First recorded at the gate. Entered in the register as Incertae sedis.
§ VI.

Questions site owners ask

Does Ruby 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 Ruby hurt my search rankings?

No. Nothing respectable will miss it.

How often does Ruby visit?

Here, about 2 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.

Also in The Feral Pit