meta-externalagent

externalhotlink by another name?

[lucy24]

This started showing up towards the end of August, and has now got vexatious enough to be blocked by name. Thoughtful of them to put the unique element at the very beginning ^ of the UA string, saving the server a few nanoseconds.

IP: facebook ranges (173.252, 69.171 and the like)
Request: random image files, scattered through the day
Referer: various
robots.txt: hahahahaha

UA: meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)

At first glance I took it for a referer-spam tool, because every image request has a different referer. But now I think all those outside sites are just innocent bystanders. Happily, the bogus referers mean that all the robot ever got was my NO HOTLINKS image (which uses a tasteful chartreuse-magenta-black color scheme).

The URL in the UA says

The Meta-ExternalAgent crawler crawls the web for use cases such as training AI models or improving products by indexing content directly.

and wraps up with a paragraph about robots.txt which would be more convincing if the UA in question had even once requested robots.txt. Or, for that matter, if the time-honored facebookexternalhit had even once honored robots.txt, which it continues to request daily.

[not2easy]

How adorable!