DanceGroveBot — what it is and how to control it

Who runs it

DanceGroveBot is operated by DanceGrove, a directory of dance studios, instructors, classes, events and competitions. We use it to keep listings current — opening hours that changed, a class that moved, an event that is over — so dancers are not sent to a closed door.

How to identify us

These are the exact strings we send. The token is what you put in a robots.txt User-agent group to govern us, and it is the token we send when we request your robots.txt.

• robots.txt tokenDanceGroveBot
• Full user-agentDanceGroveBot/1.0 (+https://www.dancegrove.com/bots)
• Contact[email protected]

One honest caveat: when we read a studio's own public website to refresh that studio's listing, the page request currently goes out with an ordinary desktop browser user-agent, even though we still request and honour your robots.txt under the DanceGroveBot token first. If you need every request from us to carry the token, write to us and we will set that for your host.

Where we crawl from

All of our crawling leaves from a single fixed server address — we do not rotate addresses and we never change address to get around a block. That means you can rate-shape or allowlist us at the network level and it will keep working.

We will give the exact address to a site owner who asks — write to the address above and we will send it.

We fetch and obey robots.txt

Before we read anything on a host we request its robots.txt and apply it:

• We match rules against the DanceGroveBot token first, and fall back to the wildcard group.
• We cache your robots.txt rather than re-requesting it on every fetch.
• If we cannot retrieve or read your robots.txt, we do not fetch the page — we would rather miss a listing than guess.
• We honour Crawl-delay, and we never crawl faster than it asks.

To slow us down, or to keep us out entirely:

User-agent: DanceGroveBot
Crawl-delay: 30
Disallow: /members/

User-agent: DanceGroveBot
Disallow: /

The first group slows us down and closes one section; the second keeps us off the site completely. Either takes effect the next time we read your robots.txt.

Asking us to slow down

robots.txt is the fastest route, but you do not have to edit a file to reach us:

• Email us and name a rate, a window, or the paths you want left alone — we will apply it.
• Tell us if we are showing up at a bad hour and we will move our schedule.
• If we are causing you load right now, say so and we will stop crawling your host while we sort it out.

What we do with what we read

A short, plain statement, so there is no ambiguity:

• We keep the facts a directory needs: name, address, contact details, opening hours, class and event schedules, prices where they are published, and the styles taught.
• We do not resell your pages, republish them wholesale, or use them to train a model.
• We credit and link back to the source, and open-data sources keep their licence — OpenStreetMap under ODbL, Wikidata under CC0.
• We do not collect personal data about your visitors, and we do not attempt to reach anything behind a login.

Getting something removed

If a listing about you is wrong, or you want it gone, you do not need to block the crawler to fix it — send us a request and a person will handle it.

Request removal or a correction · Content & data policy · [email protected]