A few years back I put some lame jokes in my robots.txt and said a hello to any human reading it. Yesterday someone(?) took a string from that greeting and set it as their bot's user-agent while mirroring a large part of the site.
... User-agent: Zombies Disallow: /brains User-agent: Killer AI Disallow: /~superkuh/ User-agent: The person who is reacting to the lame jokes that is reading this robots.txt right now. Yes, you. Allow: /hello/awarenessofthemeta/ ...
83.159.xx.xx "GET /whysospurious.png http://superkuh.com/radio-filter-simulations.html" "awarenessofthemeta" 83.159.xx.xx "GET /fig-3-from-bandstop-paper-by-guyette.png http://superkuh.com/radio-filter-simulations.html" "awarenessofthemeta" 83.159.xx.xx "GET /library/Space/Radio%20Astronomy/Time-scale-of-solar-effects-at-1AU.png http://superkuh.com/libra ry/Space/Radio%20Astronomy/" "awarenessofthemeta"
Well... hello person. I really enjoyed the out of band mechanism you've used to talk back. Either it's that or some very weird bot behavior pulling substrings from robots.txt as a random user-agent.
[comment on this post] Append "/@say/your message here" to the URL in the location bar and hit enter.