You have likely found you way to this page because you were curious about our crawlers, having seen them in your logs, and noted this page was present in the UserAgent string. Radian6 is a social media monitoring company that has developed a product offering specifically tailored to PR and marketing companies, that helps companies find and listen to conversations about their brands. You can find out more about our company at www.radian6.com.
If you have seen our crawlers visit your content, then that is because you have written about topics that are of interest to companies and brands that are using our system. This is good for you, as it means your voice is being heard, and the number of subscribers for your content has increased.
R6_FeedFetcher is our main RSS update crawler. It is responsible for checking RSS feeds periodically, looking for updates to your feed. The behavior of this agent should look similar to any other feed crawler, including compliance with robots.txt. If you have concerns about how the Radian6 crawler is interacting with your content please let us know by sending details to support@radian6.com.
You may see R6_CommentReader visit one or more of the posts found in your RSS feed periodically for a number of days. This agent is responsible for reading comments left by your visitors to posts on your feed. In this regard, it should look similar to comment tracking services such as Commentful, CoComments, or Co.mments. It only checks content relevant to our clients, and the ones it does check follow heuristics as to how often and for how long it is checked.
Why follow comments? Social media is different than traditional media in that the 'social' aspect of the medium is what makes it such a powerful force. Comments left by an involved and engaged community form a conversation, and allow everyone to have a voice in that conversation. The Radian6 comment reading agent makes sure that these comments are seen by the brands and companies using our service.
If you are concerned with the behavior of this agent, or wish to have your site excluded from these checks, please provide details and email them to support@radian6.com.