Caution! This message was sent from outside the University of Manitoba. OK! So we can make a few guesses: 1. The bot name isn't "Unknown robot identified by bot\*", the bot name is just "bot\*". (Actually, even this is highly suspect.) 2. AWStats is tell you it doesn't recognize the bot ("Unknown robot identified by...") 3. The bot name is likely bot<something>, not a literal asterisk. I think this is AWStats telling you it matched a bot by identifying the prefix "bot", i.e. AWStats did a substring match on 'bot\*' 4. You'll have to go awk'ing and grep'ing your access_log files (or maybe tweaking awstats?) to get the actual bot name. If the bot name were truly "Unknown robot identified by bot\*", then 1. you don't need the parentheses, RewriteCond expects PCRE so ( ) are only needed if grouping 2. the backslash+asterisk combination is pretty much a worst-case scenario for correctly escaping , I would sidestep the issue by matching "Unknown robot identified by bot.." instead of "Unknown robot identified by bot\*". A single period "." in regex is like a "?" in filename globbing, it matches any single character. This is not a new thing with AWStats - see https://forums.classicpress.net/t/how-to-block-uknown-robots-identified-by-a... for discussion about what "bot*" actually means. From that page, however, we can guess that you might be able to just write: RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} bot[\s_+:,\.\;\/\\\-] [NC] -Adam ________________________________ From: Montana Quiring <montanaq@gmail.com> Sent: April 22, 2025 14:05 To: Continuation of Round Table discussion <roundtable@muug.ca> Subject: [RndTbl] Re: .htaccess file: stopping robot with escape character in name Sorry man, excuse my ignorance, but not sure what you are asking. I got the bot name from AWstats, which I assume is just ASCII. Regards, -Montana On Tue, Apr 22, 2025 at 1:58 PM Adam Thompson <athompso@athompso.net<mailto:athompso@athompso.net>> wrote: Urlencode or octal? Or if it's a regex just use ".". -Adam Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg> ________________________________ From: Montana Quiring <montanaq@gmail.com<mailto:montanaq@gmail.com>> Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2025 1:47:31 PM To: Continuation of Round Table discussion <roundtable@muug.ca<mailto:roundtable@muug.ca>> Subject: [RndTbl] .htaccess file: stopping robot with escape character in name Hello Folks, I'm trying to stop a bot from crawling a site using the .htaccess file. The problem is that it's using the backslash character as its name. Grrr... It's called: Unknown robot identified by bot\* This generates an internal server error: RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ("Unknown robot identified by bot\*") [NC] I tried, this, but it didn't help: RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ("Unknown robot identified by bot\\*") [NC] Any thoughts? Regards, -Montana _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list -- roundtable@muug.ca<mailto:roundtable@muug.ca> To unsubscribe send an email to roundtable-leave@muug.ca<mailto:roundtable-leave@muug.ca> _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list -- roundtable@muug.ca To unsubscribe send an email to roundtable-leave@muug.ca