banning using user agent in .htaccess

[jlo]

Here is a really newbie question. I am banning robots using .htaccess by both ip and user agent. For user agents I use a block of code like this...

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Mo College 1.9" bad_bot

<Limit GET POST>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot
</Limit>

When I use cp panel/file manager to edit the .htaccess file and try to ban a longer user agent, the line splits into two lines and then is not recognized by the compiler. How can I ban longer user agent like this...


SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Mozilla/4.0 (compatible ; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" bad_bot

Is there a line continuation character or something?
I hope someone can help.

[Early Out]

It's just a text file, so I'd just copy .htaccess to my PC, use Notepad (or any other text editor) to make the desired changes, then FTP it back to the server.

[jlo]

duh. I guess I should have tried that before posting. Thanks,

[CranialBlaze]

Here is a really newbie question. I am banning robots using .htaccess by both ip and user agent. For user agents I use a block of code like this...

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Mo College 1.9" bad_bot

<Limit GET POST>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot
</Limit>

When I use cp panel/file manager to edit the .htaccess file and try to ban a longer user agent, the line splits into two lines and then is not recognized by the compiler. How can I ban longer user agent like this...


SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Mozilla/4.0 (compatible ; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" bad_bot

Is there a line continuation character or something?
I hope someone can help.

I see this post is really old, but this seems to be the closest google has gotten me to an answer.

My site is very country specific, it serves no beneficial purpose to anyone outside South Africa, but as its an online store it gets quite abused by non-South African traffic to the point that its started negatively affecting my server, my only solution was to limit the access by ip address to South African IP addresses only. The problem with that is i am now effectively blocking search engines too.

What i was hoping is to get some help adjusting the htaccess file to allow the bots by user-agent instead of searching for an adding thier ip addresses to the list.

My htaccess looks something like

<Limit GET HEAD POST>
order deny,allow
# Country: SOUTH AFRICA
# ISO Code: ZA
# Total Networks: 882
# Total Subnets: 15,870,464
allow from 41.0.0.0/11
allow from 41.48.0.0/13
allow from 41.66.64.0/18
allow from 41.72.128.0/19
#
deny from all
</Limit>

The list of ip addresses is much larger, but unnecessary for this question.
The most important user agents are

User-agent: Teoma
User-agent: ia_archiver
User-agent: msnbot
User-agent: Slurp
User-agent: Googlebot

Can i just include these int eh htaccess and it will work or are there other lines i need to add in.

Thanks a lot for any assistance

[felgall]

Why not find out what IP addresses the search engines use and add those.

Both Internet Explorer and Firefox allow the useragent to be set to anything at all and so anyone using either of those could easily get around any useragent test.

[CranialBlaze]

Why not find out what IP addresses the search engines use and add those.

Both Internet Explorer and Firefox allow the useragent to be set to anything at all and so anyone using either of those could easily get around any useragent test.

I do know where to find the ip addresses, but googlebot alone uses over 100 ip addresses and it is reported that they do change, if possible it would be better if not fool proof to use the useragent, if users really want to go through all the trouble to change their useragent to see my site that's fine, if they want to go through all that effort for effectively nothing then by all means.

I just need to bots to be able to access is hopefully without having to search every few weeks to make sure i have all the correct ip addresses.