Any webhost type people here? Getting spammed by Facebook bots!?

[NeilF]

I noticed an area of my website constantly getting hit from "facebookexternalhit/1.1" and "meta-externalagent/1.1". Tens of hits a minute (at least), all the time...

I've added in entries to ROBOTS.TXT but reading that facebook often ignores those, I even altered my .HTACCESS file to ban them fullstop, which seemingly has worked.

Anyone else suffering from this? Here's a random post I found via google complaining of the same thing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41090130

 

[NeilF]

Sort of nice to know it wasn't just me then...

"facebookexternalhit/1.1" were definately the huge majority, but in there were "meta-externalagent/1.1" ones too. So I just .htaccessed them both across my site...