Skip to content

Scan notifications: suppress social link-unfurl bots (WhatsApp, Facebook, etc.) #313

Description

@bmichaelis

Problem

isBotScan() in server/utils/scan-notify.ts only checks cf.botManagement.verifiedBot plus four UA markers (bot, crawler, spider, preview). Several social link-preview fetchers match none of these — facebookexternalhit, whatsapp, tiktok, mastodon, snapchat — so pasting a short link into WhatsApp/iMessage/Facebook can fire a false "someone scanned your link" push when nobody actually visited.

Rare for the QR-on-physical-object use case, but a real annoyance for digitally shared links.

Why it matters

False pushes erode trust in the notification feature — the whole point is "the physical world touched your link."

Suggested fix

server/middleware/1.redirect.ts already maintains a richer SOCIAL_BOTS list for OG-preview rendering. Export/share that list (e.g. move to a server util) and check it in isBotScan() alongside the existing markers.

Flagged by the final whole-branch review of the scan-notifications feature (shipped in 615f972..e59b76c).

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions