MovesBot

MovesBot is the crawler behind Moves. It reads the public pages where venues list what's on (events, happy hours, specials) so people can find things to do near them. Every listing it finds links back to the venue's own page.

MovesBot sends the user agent MovesBot/1.0 (+https://moves.social/bot), and answers to the robots.txt token MovesBot. It never presents itself as a browser or as another crawler. When a page builds its listings with JavaScript, MovesBot opens it in a browser that sends the same user agent.

MovesBot also signs its requests with HTTP message signatures (Web Bot Auth), so a site can check that a request really comes from it. The key it signs with is published in its key directory.

robots.txt. MovesBot follows the rules for MovesBot, or the rules for * when there is no group for it, as RFC 9309 describes. It honors a Crawl-delay of up to 60 seconds; a site asking for more isn't read.

Content signals. A site whose robots.txt says Content-Signal: ai-input=no or search=no isn't read. MovesBot trains no models.

Pacing. It makes one request at a time to a venue's site, at least a second apart, and slower when the site asks.

Walls. When a site answers with a challenge or a block page, or refuses it outright, MovesBot stops reading that site and tries again on a later run. It never solves a challenge, changes its address or identity, or otherwise gets around a wall.

The facts of what's on: what it is, when and where, a short description, and the ticket link the venue gives. Moves shows that much, with a link to the venue's page for the rest.

At most one image per listing, one the venue shows for it. Moves records the address each image came from.

To keep MovesBot off your site, add this group to your robots.txt:

User-agent: MovesBot
Disallow: /

To have your venue's listings or images taken off Moves, email [email protected] and tell us which venue. We take them down, and MovesBot stops reading your site.

Questions about MovesBot go to [email protected].