ConpassBot,
and how to stop it.

A small crawler with strict rules.

Conpass reads public event pages so a founder can see which events near them are worth a day. ConpassBot is the part that fetches those pages. It reads a list of registered sources, and a person checks any new source before it is added. It does not roam the web at random.

• It identifies itself as ConpassBot in its User-Agent, with a link to this page.
• It follows robots.txt, and it checks again on every redirect it follows.
• It rate-limits itself, on every redirect hop as well.
• It never logs in to any site.
• It never tries to get around a bot wall, a captcha or a block.
• It stores facts about an event, such as the name, date and place, and links back to the source.
• It never republishes posters or page text.
• It never builds profiles of people, and it does not collect attendee lists.