Hi, I have two questions (please don’t laugh if they seem very basic). It’s about the alphabetical order in the .htaccess file and the difficences between ^ and without the ^ when it comes to blocking bots/user agents?
What is the differrence between: RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus [OR] and just RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Zeus?
Will the second one be more thorough with blocking a bot by name? What does this ^ and the [OR] mean and are they necessary?
Question 2: I often read about many stating to post these blocks in alphabetical order with in the .htaccess file. Is this necessary (will it cause problems if it’s not in order).
For example, these are some of the bots I’m blocking (the last 4 aren’t in alpabetical order, will this cause a problem for the site if they’re not listed in precise alphabetical order):
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Xaldon\ WebSpider [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Xenu [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Xara [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Y!TunnelPro [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^YahooYSMcm [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^YandexBot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zade [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ZBot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^zerxbot
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} MJ12bot
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Linguee
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} SolomonoBot
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Lightspeedsystems
Note last 4 aren’t in order. Thanks everyone that can help, but if at all possible, please answer here and not redirect me to another site with several pages I have to scrub though to find the answer instead. I hoping one of the gurus here already know the answer to these?