Requires WP Security Ninja 5.267 or newer.
What this filter does
When Block IP Network (Global Block Network) is on, some IPs are blocked for every site on that network. Link-preview crawlers (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and similar) sometimes share those ranges.
This filter controls which User-Agent substrings count as social crawlers. Matching requests are not blocked by Block IP Network, so link previews can still work.
Matching is case-insensitive substring match against the request User-Agent.
Default list
facebookexternalhit, Facebot, LinkedInBot, Twitterbot, Slackbot-LinkExpanding, Discordbot.
Usage examples
Add an extra crawler (for example Pinterest)
add_filter( 'securityninja_social_crawler_user_agents', 'my_social_crawlers' );
function my_social_crawlers( $user_agents ) {
$user_agents[] = 'Pinterestbot';
return $user_agents;
}Remove a default crawler
add_filter( 'securityninja_social_crawler_user_agents', 'my_social_crawlers' );
function my_social_crawlers( $user_agents ) {
return array_diff( $user_agents, array( 'Discordbot' ) );
}Disable the bypass
add_filter( 'securityninja_social_crawler_user_agents', '__return_empty_array' );Important
This filter only affects Block IP Network. Other firewall rules can still block the request (including suspicious-request checks that use user_agent_items). If a User-Agent is on both the social crawler list and the user_agent_items blocklist, the blocklist wins.
