A couple weeks ago, I realised that the UCMore Toolbar was hitting my website something like 20,000 times a day (based on the User Agent string in my Apache logs). I looked into their site and it looks like it’s trying to get my favicon.ico (which I don’t have) to use as part of a suggestion for similar content to people using their toolbar.
I emailed the guys there and asked them to remove my site from their toolbar because that traffic was a waste, and the icon wasn’t even there. They replied courteously and said that they’d remove my site. A couple days later, the traffic dropped off to around 10,000 hits a day, but has since returned to, and exceeded, 20,000 hits a day.
I emailed them again, and they say they are taking care of it, but so far it looks like something similar is going to happen again (ease off, then jump up again). If things don’t change, I’m going to have to revert to a technique I have seen used around the place and use Apache Rewrites to redirect all traffic coming from their toolbar back to their site, which will be something like an automated DoS I suppose, although I don’t suppose that this amount of traffic will cause any problem on their server, but it’s a statement if nothing else.
Waiting, waiting — will give them 5 days from now.
