Feeder is a bot in the feed fetchers category, operated by Really Simple AB.
A cloud-based RSS reader with over 500 000 users subscribed to over 3 million feed URLs
Feed fetchers poll RSS and Atom feeds for readers, aggregators and podcast apps. They usually request feeds only, so they are cheap to allow. Watch for fetchers that pull full pages at high rates.
Feeder identifies itself with this user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (feeder.co; Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.0.0 Safari/537.36Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
Feeder follows robots.txt, so these rules stop it crawling the paths you choose. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: Feeder Disallow: /
User-agent: Feeder Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: Feeder Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: Feeder Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Feeder group, Feeder ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.Feeder from Feeder's user agent; check Really Simple AB's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
Feeder fetches pages when your links are shared or syndicated. Keep it allowed so previews and feeds work, but leave it out of page views and ad requests.
Transfon Security for publishersWhen ads or posts are shared, Feeder fetches the landing page. Those hits are not clicks, so keep them out of campaign reports.
Transfon Security for advertisersProduct links shared in chats and feeds are fetched by Feeder. Keep it allowed so previews show the right image and price.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow Feeder on public pages so shared links preview well, and keep it off the app.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows Feeder by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
Feeder is a bot in the feed fetchers category, operated by Really Simple AB. A cloud-based RSS reader with over 500 000 users subscribed to over 3 million feed URLs
Yes. Feeder follows robots.txt, so a Disallow rule for the Feeder user agent stops it from crawling the paths you list.
Add "User-agent: Feeder" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "feeder.co" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so Feeder may not follow it, and anyone can send Feeder's user agent, so a fake Feeder ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Feed fetchers poll RSS and Atom feeds for readers, aggregators and podcast apps. They usually request feeds only, so they are cheap to allow. Watch for fetchers that pull full pages at high rates.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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