Law Students

Don?t like Shyftr? Block the IP.

By joy

This past weekend there’s been a conversation about Shyftr a new RSS service that allows people to read and comment on full text stories on the Shyftr site, rather making the reader click through to the originating blog to comment. The thought is that folks who care about pageviews for advertising will lose out in such a scenario.

So, in the spirit of helping the wider, feathers in a ruffle, blogging community out, I’ve pasted the Shyftr RSS bot info below. The good news is that you can block the Shyftr IP address from accessing your blog (if you already have that capability through your blog hosting solution, etc.). As of present, the IP address is 66.234.234.34.

Unlike other annoying bots, I would not block the user agent in your .htaccess file as the RSS bot software the Shyftr folks are using is the generic MagpieRSS toolset, which is used by other RSS services. Hopefully, the people at Shyftr will rename the user agent to something more uniquely identifiable in the future so you can block via .htaccess.

(Note: Blocking a future unique Shyftr user agent via robots.txt probably won’t work as the crawler would need to fetch the robots.txt file first before fetching your feed and I didn’t see that behavior tonight.)

Host: 66.234.234.34
*
/feed
Http Code: 200 Date: Apr 12 19:48:28 Http Version: HTTP/1.0 Size in Bytes: 6244
Referer: -
Agent: MagpieRSS/0.72 (+http://magpierss.sf.net)
*
/favicon.ico
Http Code: 200 Date: Apr 12 19:48:28 Http Version: HTTP/1.0 Size in Bytes: 1406
Referer: -
Agent: -

Technorati Tags: Shyftr, RSS, RSS toolset, robots, crawlers, bots, lost pageviews, comments, blogger brouhaha

Full post as published by Confessions of a G33k on April 12, 2008 (boomark / email).