Thinkbot
lastmod 2025-08-26created 2025-08-262 edits
Believed to be a crawler bot owned by Tencent.
Ban me at the IP level if you have a problem
While recently analyzing web traffic, found that a web bot called Thinkbot generated the most traffic
- The bot ignores robots.txt, and its self-description is very lazy, simply saying something like “ban my IP if you have a problem”
- Over one month it used 74 different IPs, spread across 41 network blocks
- Investigation showed all of these network blocks were owned by Tencent, raising the suspicion that this might be connected to shifting the costs of the Great Firewall
- In the end, added a huge block rule covering more than about 470,000 IPs