I would be curious who has actually tracked this
traffic (themselves or via upstream ISP) and come up with a cost to
their organisation?
Are they invoicing natlib? if not.. why not?
If I were to do this sort of trolling.. personally, I would resolve
addresses to ip's and sort out what is local NZ IP's and off shore and
troll from the appropriate source... as much as I feel the ignorance of
robots.txt is against the goodwill and security of the big bad world :\
I do find it quite amusing as
to how many people in this country seem to have such a simplistic view on contracts
that they think that anyone that may have caused them trouble they can randomly
invoice for their time/expenses. You can invoice people with whom you have a
service/supply contract, any one else your only course of reproach is court
action. While the actions of NATLIB in this case may or may not be questionable
with the ignoring of the robots.txt file this does not give anyone the right to
think that they can invoice them for accessing their publicly available
website. If YOU as a web hoster have decided to serve websites, the basis for
how you have contracted your bandwidth is YOUR problem. If you want to be
protected against unforeseen spikes in traffic get flat rate hosting, not data
charged hosting.
Frankly, I have always thought
hosting websites on a data charged basis is a very risky and short sighted
option, any one in the world is quite entitled to drag whatever traffic they
want off your site as much as they wish and cost you money. It makes no
difference who or what is sucking traffic off your website, if you have chosen
to host websites on a data charged basis that’s your choice and you need
to live with the consequences. If you want piece of mind get a flat rate
option (yes they are available in NZ), otherwise stop winging.
My 2c