Yeah, the user agent I'm getting is what I posted in the original post,
uppercase "Genieo".  I could add another disallow for the lower case to see
if it makes a difference.


On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 11:36 AM, Adam Grant <[email protected]> wrote:

> The only other thing I can think of is case sensitivity:
> http://www.genieo.com/robots.txt
>
> They use lower case "g" in "genieo". Might just double check in your web
> server logs that the user agent isn't lowercased, even though their site
> says it's uppercased.
>
> Good luck!
> - Adam
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Chris McCann <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> Thanks, Adam.  According to the documentation Genieo provides it sounds
>> like their crapware is making additional requests on behalf of the user:
>>
>> Genieo is designed to automatically retrieve and filter information items
>>> from across the web, based on the user's specific individual interests, and
>>> display them on a personal Homepage.
>>> Genieo studies the user's preferred individual interests and sources at
>>> a high resolution, by analyzing their browsing routine. Our desktop
>>> configuration runs on the user's compuer to increase privacy. Genieo then
>>> continuously explores the internet for specific information items which are
>>> mostly related to these interests, and presents them on the personal
>>> Homepage.
>>> The Genieo homepage is styled as a newspaper front page with selected
>>> items, consisting of title, short snippet, media, link to article, and
>>> share button
>>
>>
>> My initial request to them for help indicated that their software DID
>> respect robots.txt, which is why I went this route.
>>
>> I am also looking at a Rack-based solution to simply redirect any
>> requests with that user agent.
>>
>> Chris
>>
>>
>>  On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Adam Grant <[email protected]>wrote:
>>
>>>  Question: Does the crapware modify your user's browser request, or is
>>> it making a second request unbeknownst to your user?
>>>
>>> Crapware doesn't usually respect robots.txt. You might need to put a
>>> middleware in your Rails app to filter out that user agent, or something at
>>> the Apache/Nginx level. Not ideal, but at least it won't trigger a routing
>>> error.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> - Adam
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Chris McCann <[email protected]>wrote:
>>>
>>>> I've had a rash of exception notifications come through from one of my
>>>> Rails apps lately.
>>>>
>>>> A ActionController::MethodNotAllowed occurred in application#index:
>>>>>   Only put and delete requests are allowed.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The culprit appears to be this:
>>>>
>>>> HTTP_USER_AGENT  : Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Genieo/1.0
>>>> http://www.genieo.com/webfilter.html)
>>>>
>>>> You can click the link to see what Genieo is (tl;dr: widely panned as
>>>> crapware).  It looks to me like one of my users has this crapware on their
>>>> computer, had it running when they interacted with my app at a URL that
>>>> should take a PUT, and now Genieo keeps hitting that link with a GET,
>>>> triggering the error.
>>>>
>>>> Looking for ways to prevent this it seemed that putting a disallow for
>>>> Genieo in robots.txt would solve it.  Here's my robots.txt file:
>>>>
>>>> # See http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html for documentation on how 
>>>> to use the robots.txt file
>>>>
>>>> #
>>>>
>>>> # To ban all spiders from the entire site uncomment the next two lines:
>>>>
>>>> User-Agent: Genieo
>>>>
>>>> Disallow: /
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> After redeploying I'm still getting the hits but don't understand why.  
>>>> I've put a request into their support to figure this out, but I'm curious 
>>>> if anyone else here has dealt with a problem like this in a similar 
>>>> fashion.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Chris
>>>>
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