Whoah. Having checked my logfiles recently, it seems this site has been getting a lot of attention from the MSN Search bot. Since August 17th, I’ve been receiving an increasing amount of traffic, especially for the RSS comments feed; msnbot beats bother Firefox and IE as the most-used user agent that visits this site. During the past week I have been getting nearly 900 requests for that feed per day, which works out once every 96 seconds. While it’s nice that MSN are adopting and using RSS, I think for a feed that is only updated several times a day in normal conditions, it’s a bit much. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

MSN Search provide a help page for webmasters, who can tell the MSN Bot to hold off accessing the site so regularly, but this is quite insulting - it should not be up to me to have to write lines of robots.txt when it’s Microsoft’s zealous and anti-social indexing bot that is the real problem. I’ve fired off a complaint and have blocked the bot’s IP address (65.54.188.51 - it is a Microsoft IP, I checked) from this site for several days. Anyone else with a blog (particularly a WordPress one) may well want to check whether they have been given the same treatment.

Update: MSN Search’s weblog have posted an “oops, our bad” message, though that was on the 22nd and it’s still been going on since…