This page provides some technical information about Shareaholic for network administrators, server admins, and web hosts.

Allowing Shareaholic for WordPress & Shareaholic for Drupal to work with your firewall

In order for a WordPress or Drupal powered site to use Shareaholic, it needs to be able to make outgoing TCP connections to servers at Shareaholic.com. If your network or host normally blocks outgoing connections from your public web servers, you’ll need to add a firewall rule permitting connections to Shareaholic.

If your security filters allow exceptions based on hostnames or IP addresses, you should permit connections on port 80 and 443 to:

Most Shareaholic API calls will be made to a hostname of the form shareaholic.com/publisher_tools/api_key.json, where api_key is an alphanumeric string that is different for each web site owner. API calls are made on port 443 by default.

Scraper Access

Part of how Shareaholic works involves the temporary display of images or details related to web content, such as the title, thumbnail and excerpt for the web page. Steve Bot is a web bot that scrapes the HTML of a web page to gather, cache and display this information. Your pages need to be visible and accessible to it.

There are two ways to give the crawler access:

1. Whitelist the user agent string
   Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Shareaholic/1.0; +https://www.shareaholic.com/steve)
2. Whitelist the IP addresses used by the bot
   54.208.16.197

If content isn’t available at the time of scraping, you can force a rescrape once it becomes available via your Shareaholic dashboard.

If you have any questions about this information or need further technical details, please contact Shareaholic support.