Unknown UA verifies for a new social media site

spoutible

[dstiles]

My daughter has signed up to spoutible as a possible alternative to twitter. She then complained to me, her webmaster, that spoutible could not access her site to confitm its existence.

Looking at the site log, the UA was mssing; also, no rDNS (though not entitrely unexpected).
Bot IP: 74.208.24.nnn, web IP: 172.66.40.nnn

The site claims to be "Powered by: Bot Sentinel", which I have not heard of but appears to be an anti-spam posting service for social media.

She has written to spoutible concerning the missing UA and is awaiting a reply...

Does anyone know about this service?

[not2easy]

I have the Bot IP shown as 1&1 Internet from a Simple Cloud Hosting "1AN1-NETWORK" on digitalocean. They also might have been 403'd for no UA?

The 172.66.40.nnn is AS13335 Cloudflare in my lists.

[dstiles]

1&1, yes - actually ionos inc. And cloudflare. I 403'd it for no UA, yes, I knew that.

[lucy24]

the UA was mssing

Yes, that’s a good way to get yourself blocked :) A few years back, facebook sometimes came in without a UA, requiring extensive hole-poking, but mercifully they’ve since come to their senses. If you are facebook or something of similar stature, with a confirmed IP, you can reasonably expect people to bend the rules for you; brand-new entities (my fingers refuse to type this word on the first try) shouldn’t count on it.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Spoutible is by Botsentinel.

Botsentinel says "We rate accounts based on a score from 0% to 100%". Read the "foreign influence" section of their about page, it doesn't get more biased and assuming.

Spoutible has a knowledgebase set up to answer all your worldly questions so it's a wikipedia wannabe too, but it has no articles in it. Nothing innovative. Perhaps the bots have come to borrow your content? Who knows.

Good luck with all that though. My opinion - "rate this!" and ban the bot without worry. It's an echo chamber who's owner is currently on Twitter fighting racism with racism.