: How to block user agent from accessing my WordPress site with htaccess? I have noticed large amount of traffic coming to my site from different IP's with user agent. Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;

@Heady270

Your regular expression specifies that the string must not have anything before or after the name of the crawler. That is what the ^ and $ do. I'm also not sure why you would have a ? in there, which makes the "r" at the end optional.

Try this instead:

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "siteexplorer" bad_user
Deny from env=bad_user

Vote Up Vote Down

@Alves908

It is more than okay to block any agent when the agent is very specific. In this case, you should be safe.

Here is an example:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*SiteExplorer.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]


You will notice that I added .* to wildcard any number of characters.

I use this method on a long list of agents where (agent2-regex|agent2-regex|agent3-regex) is used to make multiple comparisons. The () brackets the conditions and the | is an OR operator.

Vote Up Vote Down