About BotScout.com

BotScout is a service that helps fight automated web scripts, also known as "bots". Bots mindlessly roam the web looking for forms to fill out and submit in order to spread thei spam, drop links, and also to gain admittance to a site so they can find and exploit additional forms. The result of all of this includes bogus registrations on forums, pollution of your carefully-developed database(s), offensive link spam, and numerous other problems.

We Hate Bots

We hate bots and all the damage they do, including the annoyance of having to delete the by-products of their activity. So, we decided to do something about it. Using BotScout can reduce the amount of time you spend cleaning up after bots- in some cases it completely stops the bots dead!

How Does BotScout Work?

We track the names, IPs, and email addresses that bots use and then log them for future comparison. We also provide an simple API that you can use to test forms when they're submitted on your site. Doing a simple check against our database can reduce the number of bots getting through by 99%, and as mentioned above, in some cases it stops them completely.

Our Bot Database

Our database contains bot 'signatures'. A signature is composed of a unique combination of the name the bot used when trying to register, the bot's email address, and the bot's IP address. These three items are used separately to identify bots whenever they use an already-seen name, email, or IP address. Some other bot directories claim to have hundreds of thousands of bot listings, but examination shows that much of their data are duplicated records. In contrast, the BotScout database is scrubbed regularly to help make sure that it contains only unique signatures.

Stop The Bots

You can use our database to test for bots and reject them on the spot. To make use of our database in your application, all you need to do is query it correctly.

If you need to do more than about ~400 automated lookups a day you'll probably want to get a free API key so you can do as many as you need. We even provide sample code that you can use in your forums, contact forms, mailng lists, and other parts of your site.

What Does This Cost?

Nothing, zero, zip, nada. We're making BotScout available at no cost. For most personal, private, or non-commercial users there is no cost at all. (If you're a very large corporate user we may opt to charge a small fee to help cover bandwidth costs.)

How Can I Help?

  1. Tell other people and sites about BotScout to help us find, trap, and stop more bots. The more people that use BotScouts the more effective it becomes.
  2. If you really find our service useful and want to donate, please do. It's not necessary, but we'd be grateful to have some help defraying the cost of running BotScout.

Privacy Policy & Terms Of Service

You can find our Privacy Policy & Terms Of Service here.

Contacting Us

If you need to contact us, just use our contact form.