About StanPressBot

StanPressBot is StanPress's site reader. It reads a website only when someone asks StanPress to rebuild it — nearly always the site's owner, moving to a new site — and copies the words and pictures of its pages for that rebuild. It does not index the web, train anything, fill in forms or sign in anywhere.

It is polite on purpose:

  • one request at a time, with a pause between them;
  • it slows down when a site asks — a 429 or 503 answer, a Retry-After, or a Crawl-delay in robots.txt;
  • it follows robots.txt, and never reads a page robots.txt closes to it;
  • it stops when a site's security turns it away, and never tries to get around it.

How to recognize it

User-Agent
StanPressBot/1.0 (+https://stanpress.com/bot)
robots.txt token
stanpressbot
It reads from
149.56.0.20

How to let it in

If your security service turned StanPressBot away while you were moving your site to StanPress:

Cloudflare

  1. In your Cloudflare dashboard, open Security → WAF → Custom rules.
  2. Create a rule for requests whose User-Agent contains "StanPressBot" or from the IP address 149.56.0.20, with the action Skip (all remaining custom rules, and Bot Fight Mode where it is offered).
  3. If Bot Fight Mode is on (Security → Bots) and cannot be skipped on your plan, switch it off while we scan, then on again.
  4. Then come back and press Scan again.

Wordfence

  1. In your WordPress dashboard, open Wordfence → Firewall → All Firewall Options.
  2. Under "Allowlisted IP addresses that bypass all rules", add 149.56.0.20.
  3. Save, then press Scan again.

Sucuri

  1. In your Sucuri dashboard, open the firewall's Settings → Access Control.
  2. Add 149.56.0.20 under "Allowlist IP Addresses".
  3. Save, then press Scan again.

Anything else

  1. Ask whoever runs your site's security — your host, or a firewall plugin — to allow the IP address 149.56.0.20, or requests whose User-Agent contains "StanPressBot".
  2. In robots.txt we answer to "stanpressbot", and we follow what it says.
  3. Then come back and press Scan again.

How to block it

Add this to your site's robots.txt, and StanPressBot reads nothing more of it:

User-agent: stanpressbot
Disallow: /

Questions about StanPressBot? Write to hello@stanpress.com.