WordPress

[Umbra]

How do you handle requests associated with WordPress?

I'm seeing HEAD and GET requests from user agents like

WordPress/3.0.2; http://example.website.com

WordPress/MU; http ://exampleblog.wordpress.com

WordPress.com mShots; http ://support.wordpress.com/contact/
(also mentioned here [webmasterworld.com] )

...Or some standard browser user agent with a referer like http : //exampleblog.wordpress.com

I assume it's a link validation tool, but none of the above confirm exactly what it's looking for, and I'm annoyed that Wordpress doesn't care to provide a link to webmaster documentation.

Some of these Wordpress requests seem to originate from spam-friendly hosts like Planetlab... if a Wordpress hit is blocked with a 403 or 503, and assuming it's not a fake user agent, what happens on the blogger's end?

[keyplyr]

I tried allowing it, assuming it was a link checker. Then I found my content scraped on a wordpress powered blog and dug through my logs to find the scraping event request had WordPress/* as the UA, so I block it now.

[incrediBILL]

Always blocked.

[Umbra]

I tried allowing it, assuming it was a link checker. Then I found my content scraped on a wordpress powered blog and dug through my logs to find the scraping event request had WordPress/* as the UA, so I block it now.

I think it can be a link checker, because I looked up the domain in one Wordpress user agent and found an article with a link to our site. On the other hand, there's your example above... If only Wordpress would offer some documentation, I'd know better what to do.