How to block Automaton
Operated by Automaton. An end-to-end campaign and integration testing tool created to optimize your marketing, advertising and sales technology stack by ensuring setups are running as they should be.
How it identifies itself
Newsify Feed Fetcher - 3 subscribers - http://www.newsify.co/site/899429/automaton-twocanoes-software (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_1) AppleWebKit/534.48.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Safari/534.48.3)
robots.txt
What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.
User-agent: Automaton 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 ~* "(Automaton|Newsify Feed Fetcher - 3 subscribers - http:)") {
return 403;
}
Apache
In .htaccess or the vhost.
BrowserMatchNoCase "Automaton" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Newsify Feed Fetcher - 3 subscribers - http:" 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 "Automaton") or (http.user_agent contains "Newsify Feed Fetcher - 3 subscribers - http:")
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 (['Automaton', 'Newsify Feed Fetcher - 3 subscribers - http:'] as $needle) {
if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
status_header(403);
exit('Blocked: Automaton');
}
}
});
robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.
Automaton 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.