Nobody has adopted w3m yet. Adopt w3m: your name goes on a plaque on this page for a year.
w3m'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:
Its users (open-source browser) does not publish a way to verify w3m's traffic. Treat its user agent as a claim, not proof: anyone can send it.
Its users (open-source browser) publishes no way to check it, so every visit filed here is taken at its word.
How to block w3m
w3m does not read robots.txt, so a polite sign is wasted on it. Refuse it at your web server or firewall instead. User agents are easy to fake, so pair this with rate limiting.
# robots.txt will not stop w3m. Block it at the server.
# nginx
if ($http_user_agent ~* "w3m") {
return 403;
}The same thing on Apache:
# Apache (.htaccess)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} w3m [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Observed behaviour
Most active around 02:00. 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
The networks w3m's visits came from:
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 w3m 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 w3m hurt my search rankings?
No. But links to your site will be shared without a title or preview image, which tends to get fewer clicks.
How often does w3m 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.