How to block All Africa Crawler
Operated by AllAfrica Global Media. AllAfrica Global Media produces, aggregates and distributes news from across Africa, relying on agreements with more than 140 news organizations and over 500 other institutions and individuals. The AllAfrica NewsBot scrapes content from sites with whom AllAfrica has written agreements, or whose content is available without licensing restrictions or otherwise freely distributable. In all cases, the author and institution is credited in full.
How it identifies itself
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AllAfrica; +https://allafrica.com/)
robots.txt
What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.
User-agent: AllAfrica Disallow: /
nginx
In the server block, then reload.
# In the server block. 403 rather than 444: a closed connection tells the
# operator nothing, and an agent that gets a status code can log it.
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(AllAfrica)") {
return 403;
}
Apache
In .htaccess or the vhost.
BrowserMatchNoCase "AllAfrica" bad_bot
<RequireAll>
Require all granted
Require not env bad_bot
</RequireAll>
Cloudflare
Security → WAF → Custom rules.
# Security → WAF → Custom rules, action: Block (http.user_agent contains "AllAfrica")
WordPress
A child theme's functions.php, or a small plugin.
// functions.php of a child theme, or a small plugin. Runs before WordPress
// builds the page, so a blocked agent costs one PHP process and no queries.
add_action('init', function () {
$agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ?? '';
foreach (['AllAfrica'] as $needle) {
if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
status_header(403);
exit('Blocked: All Africa Crawler');
}
}
});
robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.
All Africa Crawler publishes a token, so the directive above will work for as long as it keeps honouring it — and nothing except its own good manners makes it. The server rules match on a header the requester sets, which stops the agent that says who it is and not the one that copies somebody else's name. Botscope verifies identity against DNS and published address ranges, records which check decided each request, and shows you the ones that lied.