WintroBot

What it is

When a Wintro user asks for a brief about a named person, WintroBot fetches a small number of public pages about that person and their company (about ten per brief) and reads them. It fetches pages only when a user asks for a brief; it does not run on a schedule. Each request carries a User-Agent beginning WintroBot/1.0 followed by the address of this page.

What it respects

• robots.txt. It reads your robots.txt before fetching a page and follows it. Rules written for WintroBot are used; if there are none, the rules for * apply.
• Site terms. Sites we have identified as forbidding automated access are not fetched at all.
• Public pages only. Nothing behind a login, no forms, no workarounds.
• Your server. At most 2 requests at a time to one site, at least 0.3 seconds between request starts, backing off (and honouring Retry-After) on 429 or 503 answers. On an access-denied answer (403) or a refused connection it stops for 30 minutes and does not try another way in; it does not change its name or headers or rotate addresses.

Keeping WintroBot out

Add this to your robots.txt; it takes effect the next time WintroBot would fetch a page:

User-agent: WintroBot
Disallow: /

Contact

To ask us to stop, to report a problem, or to ask a question, email support@usewintro.com with your site’s address. We will add it to our do-not-fetch list and confirm. More detail is on the Sources and limits page.