In the Browscap report page, one of the user agents reported is "Browscap Abusers". Clicking on this agent doesn't provide much additional information about this, and the readme file doesn't provide any additional info. What are "Browscap Abusers"? I'm guessing that there isn't a user agent of "Browscap Abusers" out there and that this is a category of user agents, but what user agents are included in the "Abusers" category? Why? Should I ban them in my htaccess?

Comments

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
commented
Status: Active » Fixed

The entry from the .ini file says: 

[Browscap Abusers]
Parent=DefaultProperties
Browser="Browscap Abusers"
isBanned=true

[Apple-PubSub/*]
Parent=Browscap Abusers
Browser="Apple-PubSub"

Maybe you've already seen that. I'm not sure why it's considered an "abuser" - most searches online for Apple-PubSub seem to be other people searching for what it is.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.

markDrupal’s picture

markDrupal commented
Status: Closed (fixed) » Active

Can anyone provide any additional information on "Browscap Abusers"?

I see a lot of them in my logs, how does one set the browser to "Browscap Abusers" Is there any reason this is named "Abusers"? Are they abusing something? Or shouldn't this just be renamed to "Unknown" or "Masked"?

The term "abusers" seems to imply that they are malicious users doing something they shouldn't.

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
commented
Status: Active » Fixed

"Browscap Abusers" is used for the "Apple Pub/Sub" user agent.

It's the Safari built in RSS reader. See http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1770 for example.

As to why the "Apple Pub/Sub" user agent should get marked as an Abuser, I have no idea.

If you wish to change the way it's presented, you may be interested in #570932: Administration to edit the Browscap data

markDrupal’s picture

markDrupal commented

Ok, thanks for the info. Strange that they mark them as abusers, I think "Safari RSS reader" would make more sense.

Yeah that ticket helps me. I also have a bunch of empty browscap entries from our network security scanner that I would like to mark as crawler.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.

jzornig’s picture

jzornig commented

I'd like to know what is happening with user agents that are classed as abusers? We have a google appliance for our organisation which indexes all our web sites, including my drupal sites. But this user agent is classified in the browscap database as an abuser. Does this mean that our own search appliance gets blocked from our site if I enable browscap module?