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How to block Medialogia Bot

Operated by Medialogia. Medialogia Bot is the web crawler for Medialogia, a Russian media monitoring company. It collects data from online news and social media for analysis.

How it identifies itself

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MedialogiaBot; +http://home.prod.mlg.ru/bots.txt)

robots.txt

What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.

robots.txt
User-agent: MedialogiaBot
Disallow: /

nginx

In the server block, then reload.

nginx
# 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 ~* "(MedialogiaBot|Medialogia|Medialogia Bot)") {
    return 403;
}

Apache

In .htaccess or the vhost.

Apache
BrowserMatchNoCase "MedialogiaBot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Medialogia" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Medialogia Bot" bad_bot

<RequireAll>
    Require all granted
    Require not env bad_bot
</RequireAll>

Cloudflare

Security → WAF → Custom rules.

Cloudflare
# Security → WAF → Custom rules, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "MedialogiaBot") or (http.user_agent contains "Medialogia") or (http.user_agent contains "Medialogia Bot")

WordPress

A child theme's functions.php, or a small plugin.

WordPress
// 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 (['MedialogiaBot', 'Medialogia', 'Medialogia Bot'] as $needle) {
        if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
            status_header(403);
            exit('Blocked: Medialogia Bot');
        }
    }
});

robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.

Medialogia Bot 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.

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