User-agent 008
 

I noticed spikes in visitors to my forums over the last little while and tracked them down to http://www.80legs.com/webcrawler.html

I'd never heard of this before.

According to their own description,

Quote:
008 runs on a grid computing platform that consists of several thousand computers, which is why you may see our web crawler access your site from many different IP addresses.

Why is 008 crawling my website?

008 is the user-agent used by 80legs, a web crawling service provider. 80legs allows its users to design and run custom web crawls. So, if 008 is crawling your website, it means that one or more 80legs users created a web crawl that went (eventually) to your website.
People use 80legs for a variety of reasons, including providing data to their own search engines, monitoring trends in online opinions, and other interesting applications.


To block it, you can't use IP blocking. Instead add the following to robots.txt:

Code:
User-agent: 008
Disallow: /