A summary of the Validator.nu Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the Validator.nu 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 Validator.nu 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 128.30.52.72 - - [18/Mar/2019:11:51:19 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 10726 "-" "Validator.nu/LV http://validator.w3.org/services"
HTTP User Agent
Validator.nu/LV
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 128.30.52.72.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 128.30.0.0 – 128.30.255.255 |
| OrgName: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Address: | Room W92-167 |
| Address: | 77 Massachusetts Avenue |
| City: | Cambridge |
| PostalCode: | 02139-4307 |
| Country: | US |
| Updated: | 2017-01-28 |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Owner
W3C
Country
USA
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website http://validator.w3.org/services
The referenced website doesn’t confirm that the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The suggestion is to implement exclusion via firewall configuration based upon eithe the IP address or the user agent.
Further Info
The robot is a patrt of a service provided by W3C to check websites for errors in their coding.
This particular robot is used to check a website for errors in the HTML coding.
The development of the robot is ongoing and its analysis of a website may differ.
More information is available about the Nu HTML Checker on a dedicated web page https://validator.w3.org/nu/about.html.
