Ning coming with Feedburner UA

[zerillos]

today i found a lot of these entries in my logs:

208.82.16.128 - - [04/Jan/2011:09:13:35 -0500] "GET .......... HTTP/1.1" 200 580138 "............" "FeedBurner/1.0 (http://www.FeedBurner.com)

The IP belongs to the Ning network. Do they have anything to do with Google or Feedburner? If not...this is serious foul play from their part!

[Pfui]

1.) With the exception of some of the more notorious server farms (amazonaws.com, fdcservers.net, etc.) and/or countries (massive address chunks of China, Russia, etc.), it's premature to accuse an entire network of foul play merely because one of its thousands of IPs may have spoofed a User-agent.

Even a quick skim of the posts in this forum shows that cloaked agents are a regrettably common occurrence. And FeedBurner is not immune. See: BvsB [botsvsbrowsers.com]

2.) You asked the same kind of FeedBurner-related Q about a different IP a few weeks ago:

Feedburner coming from non-Google IP [webmasterworld.com...]

If you want to make sure only 'real' FeedBurners hit your site(s), use .htaccess to constrain any UA containing "FeedBurner" (case non-specific) to Google IPs. See the Apache forum's Library docs for mod_rewrite details.