It seems OpenHatch has become popular enough to attract spammers. A few weeks, we started asking projects to say how others can help out. We’ve had a really good response to those questions!

Recently we started noticing a few failed requests from users submitting answers. I thought the system worked, so I investigated.

All the failing requests were trying to submit an answer on the same project page, which tipped me off that something might be strange. I noticed that they mostly came from the same IP address, and then I looked at what web browsers these users were using.

One was supposedly using Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 on Windows 95. That made me smile! After I noticed that the “Referer” field set to an invalid value, I concluded these requests were probably coming from a bot.

For your enjoyment, I’ve placed a list of some of the spam bot’s best user agents after the fold.

If this is a real person, he or she sure has a whole lot of web browsers installed.

• Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0d; Windows NT)
• Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95)
• Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; MSIE 3.02; Windows CE; 240×320)
• Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; WebCapture 2.0; Auto; Windows)
• Mozilla/3.0 (x86 [en] Windows NT 5.1; Sun)
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Digital AlphaServer 1000A 4/233; Windows NT; Powered By 64-Bit Alpha Processor)
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 3.1)
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 95)
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Crazy Browser 1.0.5)
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Deepnet Explorer 1.5.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en) Opera 9.0
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Netscape/8.0.4
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Crazy Browser 2.0.0 Beta 1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
• Mozilla/4.61 [en] (X11; U; ) – BrowseX (2.0.0 Windows)
• Mozilla/4.79 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U)
• Mozilla/6.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0a1; Windows NT 5.2; SV1)
• Opera/7.54 (Windows NT 5.1; U) [pl]
• Opera/9.00 (Windows NT 4.0; U; en)
• Opera/9.00 (Windows NT 5.1; U; ru)
• Opera/9.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)

One of these user-agents is for Netscape 3, plain and simple. That brings back memories.