Hi Terry.
Sorry for the delayed response. Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t know, I don’t get any email notifications or any other kind of notification from here when there are new support requests posted here for me to respond to, which means I only become aware of them when I visit here to check for myself (or, in rarer cases, when someone points it out to me), and since new support requests don’t appear frequently, I haven’t been checking here every day.
I’m looking into this now and I’ll reply again shortly.
Cheers.
Hi Terry,
> I am wondering if in fact a “real” bing Bot is being blocked from my site(s):
Your suspicions are correct, that this is, in fact, the real Bingbot.
The offending signature (157.55.38.0/23 Deny Cloud) belongs to the “Microsoft Azure IPv4 blocklist” signatures file (msaz_cidram.inc-IPv4). The reason that Bingbot is being blocked, in this case, is because the signature file in question is being used without the bypasses provided by the “Cloud Services Bypass module” (xcldbyp_cidram.inc).
When using the “MSAZ” (Microsoft Azure IPv4 blocklist), “GCP” (Google Cloud Platform IPv4 blocklist), or “AWS” (Amazon Web Services IPv4 blocklist) signature files, it should always be in conjunction with the “Cloud Services Bypass module”, in order to avoid false positives against search engines and other such services operating from within those particular networks. In this case, installing/activating that module should resolve the problem. 🙂
I’ve noticed now that the particular blocklists (signature files) in question don’t explicitly include any such warning about this at the updates page. I’ll drop a quick message to the author/maintainer of those particular blocklists in a moment to ask whether they could include such a warning (all the signature files installed by default are authored/maintained by me personally, but the particular aforementioned blocklists and related module are entirely authored/maintained by a third-party, so I’ll need to message that third-party to get that warning sorted out and to change any related descriptions/metadata/etc as per needed, but they tend to respond pretty quickly, so it shouldn’t be any problem, I think).
My apologies for the problem. If the problem still persists despite the solution suggested above, let me know.
Cheers. 🙂
