Help me understand these ipv6 entires

Product Support
1

Your software
My Mautic version is:v3.0.1
My PHP version is: 7.2.32

Your problem
My problem is:unusual ipv6 entries.

Hello, I know this is not unique to Mautic but since these IPv6 addresses are showing up in the reports, I thought someone may shine some light on it for me.

I see many ipv6 entries like: 2a03:2880:ff:13::face:b00c
and I know that they are originating from Facebook. Almost all are from Ireland whilst I am in the U.S.

What I’m trying to ascertain is are they from connections from Facebook’s internal network for general scraping of my websites, or are they from users somehow using Facebook to access my sites?

Any insights much appreciated.

These errors are showing in the log:

Steps I have tried to fix the problem:

2

Hello,

Facebook robots do visit your website. For instance when Facebook users share links to your website, the Facebook bot will fetch content/images from your site to create a screenshot. See https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler

However, the Facebook bot should not be tracked as a visitor by Mautic if “facebookexternalhit” is present in the “List of Bots to not track with (one per line)”, in the Mautic configuration panel.

1 Like
3

Thanks Ihpz, that explains it completely.

When you type “facebookexternalhit” you mean the ip address, not that phrase, correct?

Appreciate the advise.

4

“facebookexternalhit” is not an IP address, it’s a part of the user-agent string that the Facebook robot will use to identify itself when visiting your site. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent

That’s why there is a parameter called List of Bots to not track in the Mautic configuration panel. This parameter lists the user-agent strings that shall not be tracked as anonymous contacts, because they’re used by robots. “facebookexternalhit” should be in the List of Bots to not track.

5

Ah, yes. I see now. I checked the list of bots to not track and “facebookexternalhit” was already there. So I guess the question is when I create a report (which is where I’m seeing these entries) and the data to include in the report includes IP address and IP address shows “2a03:2880:10ff:7::face:b00c”, that seems to negate the entry in the “list of bots to not track”.

Unless the reporting feature ignores the “list of bots to not track”, but if that’s the case, then where exactly or in what capacity are these “list of bots to not track” not tracked, if not in reports?

It’s a bit confusing. . .

6

here are the actual log entries:

2a03:2880:ff:8::face:b00c - - [19/Jul/2020:03:19:24 -0400] "GET /mtc.js HTTP/1.1" 200 100354 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b"
2a03:2880:ff:14::face:b00c - - [19/Jul/2020:03:19:25 -0400] "OPTIONS /mtc/event HTTP/1.1" 204 - "https://xxxx.com/?fbclid=IwAR33359Cz0-UKI_K3IsoIqJDYts6b5kweNKtqDDva31pdUk22T30goG0s" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b"
2a03:2880:ff:13::face:b00c - - [19/Jul/2020:03:19:26 -0400] "POST /mtc/event HTTP/1.1" 200 112 "https://xxxx.com/?fbclid=IwAR3mTw9ujCz0-UKI_4412Yts6b5kweNKtqDDva31pdUk22T30goG0s" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b"