This is a list of useragents used by apps and services to query RSS data for podcasts.
You might use this to tag audio files to get better statistics from podcast consumption, since some audio useragents are not able to be changed from the default (AppleCoreMedia, I'm looking at you).
This data has been used to discover Tunein's actual download figures, but are usable for correctly identifying podcast apps in more circumstances than using the audio useragent by itself: particularly for browser-based plays.
You can also use this as a method to block apps you don't like from consuming your podcast; or to feed audio in a specific format to a podcast app (perhaps they don't like M4A files, for example).
If you produce your RSS feed dynamically, you could use this list to add ?_from=[rss-ua-slug] at the end of your audio requests.
This enables logfile analysis to not only use the audio useragent, but also the RSS useragent. In many cases, this allows for significantly better statistics.
Here's an example of some data using this list; and an example set of RSS feed requests.
Podfollow uses: Mozilla/5.0 +https://podfollow.com/crawling podfollowbot/1.0
It follows the best practice for useragents and contains a clear URL to find out more information, and a useragent that includes the phrase "bot" since it is.
Podnews uses: Mozilla/5.0 +https://podnews.net/bot PodnewsBot/1.0 and links to this article.
In case you're worried about being blocked, don't be: Podnews has no evidence that its bot has been blocked from any service. The presence of Mozilla/5.0 appears to calm nervous sysadmins, too.
There's only one - /src/rss-ua.json
Each entry must contain the following properties:
pattern(string): a simple unique string to search for.name(string): a humanly-readable name of this serviceslug(string): a domain-like short identifier for this service
Each entry can contain one of the following properties:
url(string): a website to discover more about this particular service.
This list is automatically generated from a MySQL database; pull requests will be accepted though.
If you use a service like Podcast Index which does the RSS scraping for you, I'd encourage you to consider stamping your audio requests by adding a _from variable at the end of the URL.
As an example, if you run a web service and are unable to change the RSS useragent, amend a call for https://example.com/audio/episode5.mp3 to https://example.com/audio/episode5.mp3?_from=podinfra.net where podinfra.net is your domain.
As another example, if the URL is https://example.com/audio/episode5.mp3?format=35 then change it to https://example.com/audio/episode5.mp3?format=35&_from=podinfra.net