Chris,

I throw rack-rewrite (https://github.com/jtrupiano/rack-rewrite) in most
apps for various purposes, this being one of them. You can use an if: ->
(rack_env) { rack_env["HTTP_USER_AGENT"].downcase == "genieo" } or
something like it to handle your case.

James


On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 11:38 AM, Chris McCann <[email protected]>wrote:

> 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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