The advantage of recording automatically IP addresses of ill-behaving robots in such a way is that you can stop immediately their predating the bandwidth whenever identified as such. There are also a couple of pages which inspired greatly my anti-badbot strategy: <http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum23/1281.htm> <http://www.kloth.net/internet/bottrap.php> <http://www.danielwebb.us/software/bot-trap/> I see your point, will dive into the links, txs! cheers, Mark