SchwiftyBot

Schwifty is an app for making plans with friends. So people can see what’s on around them, SchwiftyBot reads the page where a bar, club or venue lists its events, and Schwifty shows them with a link back to that page. When a place someone makes a plan at has no email on its map listing, it also looks on the place’s website for one, so the group’s host can write to book.

What it reads

• For events, only pages our team picked: a place’s own events page, about once a day (and again in the afternoon when the place has a night that day or the next), a few sites at a time.
• Only what anyone can see without signing in. It never signs in, fills in forms or gets past anything that turns automated readers away.
• From each event, its name, a line about it, its day and time, price, link and whether it’s sold out. Never photos, and nothing about the site’s visitors.
• For a place’s email: its home page, then at most two of its contact or legal-notice pages (Contact, Impressum), every few months at most. It keeps only the address given for bookings or enquiries, never one written to be hidden from automated readers, and nothing else from those pages.

How to recognise it

It says who it is in its user agent, Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SchwiftyBot/1.0; +https://schwifty.eu/bot), and reads your site’s robots.txt first, every time.

Stopping it

Add these two lines to your site’s robots.txt. It stops the next time it checks, and your events come off Schwifty:

• User-agent: SchwiftyBot
• Disallow: /

Or write to support@schwifty.eu: we’ll stop reading your site and take down what was read from it.

If it’s your place

You can post your events on Schwifty yourselves, with photos, and see the groups coming: run your place on Schwifty.