HotBot's top priority is to provide the best performance and highest quality of service on the internet. Unfortunately, the internet is full of malicious users that intentionally attempt to degrade the experience of all other users. To ensure superior and consistent performance for our online users, we deny service in response to these malicious requests.

If you have received the "Error 403" page in response to your request, you may be using software that provides an option for preventing the name of your browser from being sent to our servers. We require this name, known as the "user-agent string", in order to effectively service your web browser request.

Examples of software that provides this feature are Norton's Internet Security and Zone Labs' ZoneAlarm Pro. These products provide our users with beneficial security features to protect them from the same sort of malicious behavior that HotBot is subject to. We do not require our users to disable these products in order to use our site, but we do require that all requests transmit User-agent information. If you are using either of these software packages or something similar, please review your documentation to be sure that you are not explicitly preventing the name of your browser (User-agent) from being sent with your request.

Specific Tools:

Norton Internet Security 2002 To ensure you are not preventing your User-agent information from being sent to our servers follow these steps:

1. Launch Internet Security.

2. Select Privacy Control.

3. Select the Options button at the top of the window.

4. In the window that appears, select Advanced Options.

5. Choose the Privacy tab.

6. Under the Browser Privacy section, be sure that the Browser (User-agent) is set to Permit or Reply. If you choose Reply be certain to include a message in the adjacent box. The default message "Blocked by Norton" should work fine.