ActionView::MissingTemplate Error, Only When Visited By A Bot?

I have an action that serves my homepage. It works fine when visited normally (ie by a user in a web browser), but when visited by specific web crawlers, it throws the following error:

 A ActionView::MissingTemplate occurred in tags#promoted:

 Missing template tags/promoted with {:handlers=>[:erb, :rjs, :builder, :rhtml, :rxml], :formats=>["text/*"], :locale=>[:en, :en]} in view paths "/Apps/accounts/app/views", "/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180@accounts/gems/devise-1.3.0/app/views"
 actionpack (3.0.4) lib/action_view/paths.rb:15:in `find'

It appears the bots are trying to fetch the text/* format, which there is no template for, which makes sense, so I tried to do the following in my action:

  def promoted
   request.format = :html #force html to avoid causing missing template errors
   # more action stuff....
  end

In essence, I am trying to force the request's format to html so it serves the html template.

Yet every time these set of bots request this page, the missing template err开发者_如何学Pythonor occurs.

It's not that big of deal, but ideally I'd like to resolve this error, if only so I stop getting these error emails from my app.

Is the only way to make a file called my_action.text.erb and put some gibberish in it? Or can I solve this more elegantly?

---

I've been seeing these as well. You could use some middleware to rewrite these requests:

class Bot
  def initialize(app)
    @app = app
  end

  def call(env)
    h = env["HTTP_ACCEPT"]
    env["HTTP_ACCEPT"] = "text/html" if h == "text/*"
    @app.call(env)
  end
end

I forked a gem for killing off some MS Office Discovery Requests, and it seemed to make sense to add this middleware into it.

https://github.com/jwigal/rack-options-request

---

It turns out this specific set of bots are as dumb as a rock, and ignore any sort of request formatting as I was trying to do. I ended up disallowing these bots' User-Agents in my robots.txt. No more errors. However, if somebody has a more elegant solution, please post it and I'll mark it as the accepted answer, otherwise, I'll accept this one in a couple of days.