Flipboard User-Agent Strings
If you don't know who you truly are, you'll never know what you really want. – Roy T. Bennett
We often receive questions about what kinds of requests Flipboard makes and when. All requests coming from Flipboard have the string Flipboard somewhere in the User-Agent header, to help identify requests coming from us. Requests can come from a client or a server. Clients are always on behalf of a user. Servers are for backend systems made in response to a user action or partner configuration.
Here is a breakdown of the various user agents you may see
| String | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Any request made by the Flipboard App on iOS or Android as well ad the Briefing app on Samsung phones. | Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.0.0; SM-A720F Build/R16NW; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Mobile Safari/537.36 Flipboard/4.1.13/4342,4.1.13.4342 | |
| FlipboardProxy | Flipboard uses a proxy service to fetch, validate, and prepare certain elements of websites for presentation through the Flipboard Application | Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:49.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0 (FlipboardProxy/1.2; +http://flipboard.com/browserproxy) |
| FlipboardRSS | Any request made from servers for RSS feeds | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FlipboardRSS/1.2; +http://flipboard.com/browserproxy) |
| Flipboard ActivityPub | Activity Pub Requests | Flipboard ActivityPub/1.0.0 (+https://flipboard.com) |
Note that after a request for an RSS feed one should expect to see numerous requests from the Proxy for excerpt extraction and image thumbnailing of the RSS items.
Older User Agents
In the past, we have used FlipboardBriefing, Flipboard-Briefing, and FlipboardSeneca but these are being phased out.
Verification
You can verify Flipboard requests by checking for string above in the user agent. To cover all user agents, look for Flipboard in the User-Agent header.
Flipboard primarily runs in the AWS cloud in the us-east-1 availability zone, so a request can emerge from any public ip address within that zone as they change often and occur from a large pool of shareable instances. However, if you want to specifically verify the ip addresses we use via reverse DNS lookup, you can get the list of ip addresses to check against here
Control
For server related requests, we honor robots.txt Disallow and will not crawl your site when this is specified.
Reporting Issues
If you have problems with any requests coming from Flipboard, we are here to help. Whether you would like us to never make requests to your domain (blocking from our side) or reducing the rate of requests or limiting to a specific set of originating ip addresses, reach out to us.