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I just wrote up an article on this subject at my blog here: http://www.thiscanada.com/2005/10/04/keep-out-bots/

If the Moderator(s) feel that it is worthy of full-text inclusion in the Joomla! FAQ forum, go right ahead.  Also, any critiques would be appreciated as it works for me in a home-server installation.  Other mileage may vary, etc.

Although I have posted the article on a WordPress blog (shame, shame, resign) I will also be putting it on my new site at http://www.thistechnology.com which is a new Joomla! site replacing my old *ambo 4.5x site.  Unfortunately, I am just developing content on this site, so ThisCanada.com was a better selection for now.  Abject apologies.

Thanks for posting this.  Quite helpful if you run your own web server.  Any advice for those of us using hosted servers?

Very kind.  As to hosted sites, I've had good luck searching through the Security and whatnot forums at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/.

On the other hand, a lot of the steps described in the article are still applicable to a hosted environment if you have mod_rewrite available, i.e., use an .htaccess file with the "keep-out" payload in each document root directory; just one if you have one site.