We have paused all crawling as of Feb 6th, 2025 until we implement robots.txt support. Stats will not update during this period.

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    22 hours ago

    It’s been a consensus for decades

    Let’s see about that.

    Wikipedia lists http://www.robotstxt.org/ as the official homepage of robots.txt and the “Robots Exclusion Protocol”. In the FAQ at http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html the first entry is “What is a WWW robot?” http://www.robotstxt.org/faq/what.html. It says:

    A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web’s hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced.

    That’s not FediDB. That’s not even nodeinfo.

    • WhoLooksHere@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      19 hours ago

      From your own wiki link

      robots.txt is the filename used for implementing the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the website they are allowed to visit.

      How is fedidb not an “other web robot”?

      • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
        21·
        16 hours ago

        Ok if you want to focus on that single phrase and ignore the whole rest of the page which documents decades of stuff to do with search engines and not a single mention of api endpoints, that’s fine. You can have the win on this, here’s a gold star.

        • WhoLooksHere@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          6 hours ago

          Okay,

          So why should reinevent a standard when one that serves functionally the same purpose with one of implied consent?

          Edit: my problem isn’t robots.txt. It’s implied consent.

          If you are ever thinking, I wonder if I should ask, the answer is always yes. Doesn’t matter the situation. If you are not 1000% sure you have consent, you don’t. That’s just my ethics.

          If you want to propose a new standard, go nuts. But implied consent is not it.