averixus

Ugh, turns out it was LiteSpeed cache which got automatically installed on my site.

Hi @df50, I’m not sure how helpful I can be but I’ll give you all the information I have. My host said this in reply to my question:

I believe the IP may have been blocked by our server firewall, I’ve cleared out the firewall blocks and i’m seeing a 200 OK response via the Facebook Debug tool.

It looks like this was being classed as a bad bot / bad crawler on our server.

We’ve adjusted your .htaccess file to state that this is a Good Bot and to allow it through, the firewall block appears to have likely been from when this was being classed as a bad bot by the system, so this should now be fine going forward.

I looked in the .htaccess file and found these added lines. I’m not sure if they’re host-specific or not (I’m with EcoHosting) but just in case it helps:

BrowserMatchNoCase “(?:\b)FacebookBot(?:\b)” good_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase “(?:\b)facebookexternalhit(?:\b)” good_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase “(?:\b)Facebot(?:\b)” good_bot

My server host discovered that something was being blocked by their firewall. Resolved now ??

Thank you, that worked! I was too busy assuming I needed to use a buried storefront hook, it didn’t occur to me that I could just add it to a raw template.

Unfortunately that doesn’t work for my purposes, I need to be able to italicise one or more words anywhere within the title.