Who or what is FreshPingBot?

General
1

Oh, this is a fun thing i found while searching through random websites to find examples of robots.txt files. As I looked at Replit’s robots.txt file, there was one user agent that stood out. FreshPingBot was not allowed to go through the page at all.

WHO OR WHAT IS FRESHPINGBOT???

robots.txt of Replit

Any answer or speculation is appreciated :upside_down_face:

Theories and Updates:
Update 1 - Freshping is a pinging service similar to UptimeRobot, and also sends a custom User-Agent. See this reply from @haroon to learn more.
Update 2 - Two of the Replit Team members in the Friends of Replit discord server (IroncladDev and Ray) have no clue.

@haroon's theory (Day 1 & Leading Theory*)

We now know that Freshping is a pinging service similar to UptimeRobot, however do not know why it:

According to a page that goes over user agents of Freshworks (the company who made Freshping), we see that it does not respect robots.txt. (see image below)


Udger screenshot (website that keeps track of user-agents)

@OmegaOrbitals' theory (Day 1)

No details are available for this, however is a very interesting theory.

@NoNameByProgram's theory (Day 1)

My theory is that users spammed https://replit.com/ with something similar to UptimeRobot which either stressed their servers, or spammed them – leading to a Denial of Service attack; however, it is very strange that the bot follows the rules of robots.txt.

3 Likes
2

Maybe it’s one of replit’s experiments that went wrong, and now they have to contain it to prevent it from taking over replit :eyes:

4 Likes
3

I love that theory :eyes:

4 Likes
4

Freshping is a pinging service similar to UptimeRobot in the sense that it gets the website status of a site (and in the process wakes them up).

Like most pingers, when FreshPing pings a server, it sends a custom user-agent so that that the server can know that it is FreshPing.

Now that we’ve got the who and what, let’s think of theories of why it’s blocked.

I kinda agree with NNBP - perhaps people tried to add Replit to FreshPing which accidentally caused a DoS attack? I’m not really sure of the details. As for why it follows robots.txt - no clue whatsoever to why the devs decided to do that.

4 Likes
5

This is the theory that makes most sense; however, see the top message again – I’ve updated the info.
Under the section that contains your name, you can see I added a little more stuff to your theory :eyes:

I appreciate you taking time out of your day to find out about Freshping :slight_smile:

3 Likes
6

they blocking pingers :anguished: :scream:

2 Likes
7

what how. Is that possible.
???
:crying_cat_face:

1 Like
9

I actually knew a lot about Freshping before this haha

2 Likes
10

Okay, so I’ve reached out to two Replit Team members. This is what they said:

ray's answer

no idea actually lmao

ironclad's answer

idk
idk939×195 29.2 KB

1 Like
11

What is this URL and how did you find it?

2 Likes
12

/robots.txt

It’s a file used by many sites to configure how crawlers (such as search engines) find sites.

5 Likes