Yahoo Slurp Spider emailing members?

I noticed several of the Yahoo spiders emailing members... of course it was getting a red stop sign... but it's wasting time going through all my members trying to email them.

How can I prevent this?

Thanks!

Hello Sonnie,

perhaps adding the following to robots.txt will prevent yahoo bot from doing so:

Code:

Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php

Btw, I just noticed that all your entries in robots.txt are looking like "Disallow: /ajax.php" etc, while your vBulletin folder is /forums/. You should include it into every line like in my example above.

Thanks Oleg,

Yeah... I had /sendmessage.php in there but didn't have the /forums/ in there.

My robots.txt file is in my root directory and there are some root folders and files that I assume I won't need to insert the /forums/ in front of. I also assume I need to keep the robots.txt file in the root and not move it to /forums. Am I assuming all this correctly?

Yes, confirming - you should keep robots.txt in the domain root and add /forums/ for the vB pages definition.

Thank you kindly... I think I got it all fixed now... hopefully.

Great!

I hate to revive a zombie thread, but I searched, honest I did! This is the only good piece of advice that I could find on the subject of Yahoo slurps attempting to email vBulletin members. I had never heard of it before today, but I saw it, it does happen. My question to any of the posters of this thread who are still alive (!)
Did this work?

Code:

Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php

Thanks!

robots is merely a suggestion.

you should enable captcha or another human verification for guests on the email system.

Thanks, Brian! We are using captcha and email send/receive verification. The slurps are not registering as users, they are attempting and failing to send email to our users.