I encountered a major WTF in my personal site’s logs:
2a03:2880:21ff:c::face:blahblah - - [16/Aug/2020:21:12:35 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5719 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b"
et cetera: complete visit with all supporting files including favicon. In fact the request started out on the HTTP side with
GET /?fbclid=IwAR1D64YQmdAUUconR9f98DAh1JUBvvQ1E_7OjljUZgDDPGszcwfOXdfSJk8
which gets a generic strip-the-query redirect.
My first reaction was to run and check the IP to make sure it hadn’t been bought by Bing when I wasn’t looking. Nope, still FB. (Besides, Bing wouldn’t make a point of slipping :face: into the IP.)
Query: What the heck is Bing Preview doing in a Facebook range--or, conversely, why the heck is Facebook using the Bing Preview UA?
For comparison purposes: Bing Preview normally comes from 40.77--exceptions are so rare, they’re almost certainly fakers--and much of the time they get
only css, js and fonts. In fact I don’t think it is a real Preview, the kind that displays a thumbnail to human searchers, or at least hasn’t been in several years. It seems to be more of a usability/accessibility tester.
