🤖 Overview

RSSingBot is an automated web crawler operated by the RSSing feed aggregation service (rssing.com), a platform that collects and syndicates RSS/Atom feeds from millions of websites worldwide. Its primary purpose is to fetch and cache feed content for users who subscribe to feeds via the RSSing portal, enabling real-time news aggregation, web clipping, and offline reading. The bot is a legitimate, non-malicious agent used solely for indexing and distributing publicly available feed data to RSSing subscribers.

🌐 Technical Behavior

RSSingBot performs HTTP GET requests with a standard Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 header and respects the If-Modified-Since header to minimize server load by fetching only updated content. Crawl patterns are periodic and burst-based: the bot often re-checks feeds every 15–60 minutes depending on the feed’s update frequency declared in the original RSS/Atom XML. It does not crawl deep site structures; instead, it exclusively requests the specific URLs of feeds and linked pages that are referenced in those feeds. IP ranges reportedly belong to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Hetzner, with common IPs like 54.36.113.55 and 5.9.50.178 observed in server logs. The bot uses HTTP/1.1 and respects standard SSL/TLS encryption, and it does not execute JavaScript or submit forms.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to official documentation and community reports, RSSingBot fully honors Disallow directives in robots.txt. The bot’s source code (available on GitHub at github.com/rssing/robot) explicitly checks robots.txt before each request, and if a resource is disallowed, it skips the request entirely. Additionally, the bot respects Crawl-delay directives, inserting a pause between requests as specified. This compliance is consistently verified by webmasters who report reduced load after blocking the bot in robots.txt.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is RSSingBot/1.0 (+http://www.rssing.com/robot.html). Some variations include RSSing without the version suffix, or RSSingBot/2.0 on newer deployments. The bot does not set a custom X-Forwarded-For header and rarely sends a Referer header. Behavioral fingerprinting shows that RSSingBot always requests GET / for the site root before following feed links, and it never sends POST requests or accepts cookies. Log analysis tools can identify the bot by the combination of steady request intervals (every few minutes) and the specific User-Agent string.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data—feed items, article titles, summaries, and linked page content—is cached on RSSing’s servers for the sole purpose of serving aggregated feeds to end users. The service does not sell raw data or use it for AI training; instead, it acts as a proxy feed reader. RSSing’s privacy policy (rssing.com/privacy) states that cached content is stored temporarily (usually 24 hours) and is deleted if the original feed returns a 404. No personal or behavioral data is extracted from subscriber activity.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

RSSingBot is rate-limited because its aggressive polling of feeds—often every 15 minutes—can generate disproportionate load on small websites with many subscribers. Systems administrators implement thresholds (e.g., 100 requests per minute per IP) to prevent resource exhaustion while still allowing the legitimate feed aggregation function. The bot itself supports Crawl-delay in robots.txt, so responsible webmasters can tune its aggressiveness without blocking it entirely.

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the bots listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.