A summary of the TelegramBot Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the TelegramBot robot? Is it a good or a bad robot? And why is it visiting your website?
Shown below is a sample log file entry for the TelegramBot web robot. It’s derived from an Apache web server log file. From the log entry information about how the robot identifies itself, HTTP User Agent, and where it is hosted are given.
Server Log File
vntweb.co.uk 149.154.161.5 - - [12/Apr/2019:07:56:04 +0100] "GET /delete-icon-from-kde-panel/ HTTP/1.1" 200 8278 "-" "TelegramBot (like TwitterBot)"
HTTP User Agent
TelegramBot
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 149.154.161.5.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| inetnum: | 149.154.160.0 – 149.154.163.255 |
| netname: | Telegram_Messenger_Network |
| address: | P.O. Box 146, Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands |
| last-modified: | 2014-03-08T03:31:36Z |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Telegram Messenger Network.
Owner
Telegram Messenger
Country
GB
Exclusion
The user-agent string doesn’t include a reference to a website support page, with details about the robot.
However, you may wish to try the following entry in the robots.txt file to prevent TelegramBot from visiting your site
User-agent: TelegramBot Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of TelegramBot visiting your site, setting a minimum acceptable delay between consecutive requests can be set with the following added to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: TelegramBot Crawl-Delay: 10
As is common with website crawlers there is a delay between changes made to the robots.txt file and the change being implemented.
Take care making changes to the robots.txt file. A misunderstanding in configuration or an error in configuration can lead to important search engines excluding your website.
Further Info
Telegram is a mobile and desktop messaging app like. The Telegram website includes an FAQ page with general details about Telegram. The references to bots sparked my interest – but these are bots which connect to the telegram system, not website robots.
