FlipboardProxy

FlipboardProxy is the web crawler for Flipboard, the social magazine app that aggregates content into a personalized reading experience. The bot's job is to fetch, process, and present web content within the Flipboard application. It identifies itself in server logs with a distinctive user-agent string like Mozilla/5.0 (...) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0 (FlipboardProxy/1.2; +http://flipboard.com/browserproxy). The crawler operates from Amazon Web Services infrastructure and often makes sequential requests to retrieve a page's HTML and its associated assets, like images and stylesheets.

FlipboardProxy is visiting your site because Flipboard users have shown interest in your content. This can happen when a user adds your site to their Flipboard feed, your content is widely shared on social media platforms that Flipboard monitors, or your site's RSS feed is indexed by the service. The crawler looks for article content, metadata, and images to generate the rich previews that are a core feature of the Flipboard app. The frequency of visits depends on your site's popularity among Flipboard users.

The purpose of FlipboardProxy is to support Flipboard's core service of aggregating content into a personalized "social magazine." The crawler collects and processes web content to create optimized previews within the app, allowing users to discover and engage with your content. When a user is interested in a preview, they can tap through to view the full article on your website. For publishers, this can be a valuable source of referral traffic and a way to reach a new audience through Flipboard's content discovery mechanisms.

If you wish to prevent FlipboardProxy from accessing your site, you can add a disallow rule to your robots.txt file. Note that this will prevent previews of your content from being generated within the Flipboard app.

To block FlipboardProxy, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: FlipboardProxy
Disallow: /