FactFiefCaptureBot

FactFiefCaptureBot is the reader of Fact Fief, a research tool for students who compete in Stoa Christian homeschool speech and debate. It fetches a public web page so that a student can read it inside Fact Fief and quote it in the page's own words.

What it fetches, and when

• A page a student opens: from their search, from an address they typed, or from a link on a page they are reading.
• A preview of the results of a student's search, so each result can be described from the page itself.
• A page a student has already quoted from, again about every 30 days to see whether it has changed, and whenever a student asks to check it again.
• One fixed page once a day, to check that the reader works.
• Your site's robots.txt, before any of these.
• The Internet Archive's copy of a page, when your site turns the reader away.

What it never does

• It never signs in, pays, or answers a challenge meant for a person.
• It never follows links on its own. Every page it fetches was asked for by a student, or is one of the checks above.
• It never tells your site which student asked for a page.
• If your site refuses it, it does not try again under another name or from another address.

How to allow it or block it

It obeys the rules in your robots.txt for User-agent: FactFiefCaptureBot, and the rules for User-agent: * when there are none for it. It obeys Crawl-delay too. To keep it off your whole site:

User-agent: FactFiefCaptureBot
Disallow: /

It names itself in every request: FactFiefCaptureBot (+https://factfief.com/bot) from its browser, and FactFiefCaptureBot/1.0 when it fetches a PDF or a robots.txt.

Signed requests

Its requests carry an HTTP message signature (RFC 9421, in the form the Web Bot Auth drafts describe) naming https://factfief.com. A site can check a signature against the public keys at https://factfief.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. A signature says only that the request was sent by Fact Fief's reader.

Contact

Write to bot@factfief.com.