[Janel]

Recent search engine activity has overloaded huge numbers of forums with a different search approach. Inktomi/Yahoo has been fingering multiple pages multiple times at intervals of one second or more. We have shown a history of this for several weeks, with an increase each day. I have turned to a forum administrators help forum, and have decided to ban IP addresses of the range that seems to be searching our site. I did not want to stop the normal progress of getting our forum information on to the search engine, but the forums which are experiencing this overload are having to pay for the extra bandwidth being used by this particular search engine.

I report this to you all, in case your IP address has been banned. Try to find me and send me an email to tell me about it. It is my guess that none of our members are in that range of IP addresses. I am sorry if you are.

This situation has been growing in intensity, skewing our statistics, and may even cost us something. I have not heard about that part yet. I hope that this will be resolved by Yahoo, and they will begin to search in a responsible and helpful manner. When that happens, the IP address ban will be removed.

Janel