RockMelt

[TheMadScientist]

Always comes from the same IP Address?

Is it a bot spoofing or is it the pre-fetching or is it because it's not sending an X_FORWARDED_FOR or is it (blah I'm not thinking of here) ...

Why do I always see the same IP address and no referrer for RockMelt's UA (or what I think could be RockMelt's Official UA) I really can't find much on this one.

Here's what I'm seeing; always from the same IP:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) RockMelt/0.8.40.147 Chrome/8.0.552.231 Safari/534.10

[wilderness]

Plenty of info on google:

RockMelt is a social browser that integrates Facebook and Twitter
Rockmelt is built on Chromium, the open-source platform behind Google Chrome.

[TheMadScientist]

Well I thought I looked up the IP Address before I posted, but apparently I was a bit confused ... I probably wouldn't have posted if I had, but I'm sort of glad I didn't look, because this might help someone else.

It's a spoof from bhpinfosolutions.co.uk which now has it's IP Address blocked in my .htaccess

To those who spider: Don't spoof ... All it does is get you blocked and make you look bad.

Honestly, if they'd used a correct user-agent for a bot from their site and had a page about it on their site I wouldn't have blocked them ... I'm not at all block happy and I'll usually let people spider away on some sites because they really can't copy the site and do themselves any good. The product is non-content oriented and people have to visit the site to get it, so if I get a visit or 3 out of it then I'm happy.

Amnyway, if you're seeing the above user-agent in your logs I suggest checking the IP Address and if it's from bhpinfosolutions.co.uk then it's a spoofed agent and I'm sure you'll react accordingly.

[TheMadScientist]

Plenty of info on google

Yeah, I got all that, but didn't see the actual, official user-agent string anywhere... Did you find it?

[wilderness]

Did you find it

I didn't look for that, rather just a description of the software.

In the UA you provided it's an add-on or plug-in and not its own independent UA.

[GaryK]

RockMelt is quite legit. I've been in contact with the developer, a guy named Michael, and he supplied me with a list of valid user agents.