WordPress support page bot?

[GaryK]

WordPress.com mShots; [support.wordpress.com...]
66.135.48.nnn
mshots2.sat.wordpress.com

I can't seem to find out what mshots are, but from what I've seen they seem like screenshots.

Here's what's happening. The above UA hits a page that would make sense to do a screenshot of but that you can't just deep link to without getting a 403. But on the 403.asp page the UA changes to Python-urllib/2.5.

Can someone help clue me in please? Thanks.

Oh, yeah I know it's coming from a ServerBeach IP. ;)

[Pfui]

mshots/mShots/whatever appear to be an enable/disable 'site preview' feature (read: Yet Another Screenshot Thing) for WordPress bloggers. Google the following for misc. bits:

WordPress mshots

I've seen an interesting mix of mshot(s)-related Hosts and UAs:

mshots1.sat.wordpress.com
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.1+ (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari/525.1+) pythumbnail.py

robots.txt? NO

13.2.233.nn.static.reverse.ltdomains.com
WordPress.com mShots; [support.wordpress.com...]

robots.txt? NO

[GaryK]

Thanks. I did sort of figure it was for screenshots. What I can't figure out is why it changes UA after being redirected to my 403 page.

[jdMorgan]

Likely because they want to record the fact that they got a 403, but they don't want to make a screenshot of your 403 page. So the screenshot 'bot likely passes the IP address to a "Not a 200-OK response" analyzer of some kind.

Just a guess...

Jim

[GaryK]

So the second the screenshot bot sees it's gotten a 403 it swaps out the screenshot bot UA for the other one so when the 403 page loads the new UA is already in use? Or are you suggesting the screenshot bot passes the URL, not the IP address as you stated, to the second bot for some kind of analysis?