# Rubot looks sketchy

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rubot-looks-sketchy/149683>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [September 28, 2008, 4:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rubot-looks-sketchy/149683 "2008-09-28T04:28:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tcsnide](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/eb8c5e/32.png) [@tcsnide](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tcsnide)\
**Post date:** [September 28, 2008, 4:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rubot-looks-sketchy/149683/1 "2008-09-28T04:28:16Z")

</div>

Anyone know about this project?

[http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubot/](http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubot/)

I found if odd that this v0.0.1 lib would be #3 all time top download  
at Rubyforge. Looking at what it’s does got me thinking it’s probably  
not being used for “Good”. It’s a MediaWiki scrapping bot, and it has  
over 784,721 downloads.

I for one am tired of getting b.s. regurgitated search results and  
this looks like a facilitator.

What do others think?

T.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tcsnide](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/eb8c5e/32.png) [@tcsnide](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tcsnide)\
**Post date:** [October 30, 2008, 11:26am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rubot-looks-sketchy/149683/2 "2008-10-30T11:26:06Z")

</div>

Hi, I’m the rubot developer. I wrote rubot mainly for myself and am  
using it for this bot:  
[Benutzer:Bot Tom - Ardapedia](http://ardapedia.herr-der-ringe-film.de/index.php/Benutzer:Bot_Tom).  
Actually, the version available from Rubyforge is somewhat outdated  
and indeed sketchy. I have no clue where all does downloads came from  
and I have not heard from anybody using this library besides myself.

Konstantin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tcsnide](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/eb8c5e/32.png) [@tcsnide](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tcsnide)\
**Post date:** [October 30, 2008, 1:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rubot-looks-sketchy/149683/3 "2008-10-30T13:42:26Z")

</div>

On Oct 30, 4:24 am, RKH [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)  
wrote:

> Hi, I’m the rubot developer. I wrote rubot mainly for myself and am  
> using it for this bot:[Benutzer:Bot Tom - Ardapedia](http://ardapedia.herr-der-ringe-film.de/index.php/Benutzer:Bot_Tom).  
> Actually, the version available from Rubyforge is somewhat outdated  
> and indeed sketchy. I have no clue where all does downloads came from  
> and I have not heard from anybody using this library besides myself.

Indeed, I notified Tom about this shortly after it happened. There was  
a one week period where this library was getting 100k downloads a day,  
so probably a bot. I don’t know if Tom chose to investigate that  
incident more deeply, but I think it’s back to about 1 download per  
day.

Regards,

Dan