This freaking googlebot is making a habit of regular appearance on my forum. I do not want to pay for the massive bandwidth consumption that entaiuls the honor of having this botr index my site.
Can anyone help me go about blocking this ****er?
Hmmmm, loose a bit of bandwidth or get indexed by the internet number 1. let me think, this one is tough.
like anyone with common sense is going to disallow googlebot from indexing their site. I have googlebot, Msn search & Yahoo Slurp practically living on my forum. Although Googlebot is there the most, this can only be a good thing, every time that little fairy visits your page, your url gets another notch in the bed post (just 1 of the many many factors in the google pagerank algorithm)
friend, if you have any sense you will forget your post and pay for the fraction of bandwidth, im chewing through 50 gig a month on my forums at the minute and its only 2 months old, with 500 members. adsense supports the maintenance of the site through the main site of which the forum is related to. try adding a few well place adsense scripts and cover you cost's, or get a reseller account with some decent limits, 34sp is good for the uk. good luck
You can just disable it to places where it gets a bit lost if you like, like calendar.php.
To limit the pages Googlebot (and other bots) can browse and possibly save you some bandwidth in the future create a file called "robots.txt" with the following:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /moderation.php
Disallow: /ratethread.php
Disallow: /report.php
Disallow: /reputation.php
Disallow: /sendthread.php
Disallow: /usercp.php
Disallow: /usercp2.php
Disallow: /postings.php
Disallow: /newreply.php
Disallow: /newthread.php
Disallow: /editpost.php
Disallow: /private.php
Disallow: /search.php
And upload it to your root forums directory (ex. /home/your_site/public_html/forums/).