Problem http User-Agents

Stop the Bandwidth Hogs

An Apache rewrite rule to block the pesky httpd_User_Agents that slow up my server because of the bandwidth they use up.

I have built up this list of problem user-agents over months of log analysis. Most of these agents ignore robots.txt or at best, ignore the crawler-delay command in robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 4	

Add the following lines to your httpd config file: /etc/httpd/conf.d/domainname.conf

multi-line version

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} \
    Custom-AsyncHttpClient|EzoicBot|Turnitin|sqlmap|wikiteam3dumpgenerator|\
    Seekport|HawaiiBot|SenutoBot|Go-http-client|AwarioBot|Wget|Bytespider|\
    BLEXBot|webmeup-crawler|AhrefsBot|Amazonbot|ImagesiftBot|DataForSeoBot|\
    Barkrowler|MJ12Bot|Semrush|GPTBot [NC]

RewriteRule . - [R=429,L]

single line version

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Custom-AsyncHttpClient|EzoicBot|Turnitin|sqlmap|wikiteam3dumpgenerator|Seekport|HawaiiBot|SenutoBot|Go-http-client|AwarioBot|Wget|Bytespider|BLEXBot|webmeup-crawler|AhrefsBot|Amazonbot|ImagesiftBot|DataForSeoBot|Barkrowler|MJ12Bot|Semrush|GPTBot [NC]

RewriteRule . - [R=429,L]

I prefer to use error code 429 [Too Many Requests] but if you prefer to block with httpd error code 410 [Gone] then change the RewriteRule to the example below:

RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F,L]

Test your config first!

Run the following command to test your httpd config file before restarting!

sudo apachectl configtest

If there are no errors then restart your apache daemon to begin blocking the pests with your new rules!

#tools #problemhttpuseragents #badbots #apache #httpdconf