Our crawler

NetworkingNetwork-EventBot

If this name is in your server log or firewall, this is who we are and what we were doing.

What it does

It reads the public events page of business networking groups so their upcoming meetings appear, with a link back to the organiser, on the Networking Network regional sites (North Wales Networking, Cheshire Networking, Merseyside Networking, Lancashire Networking, Staffordshire Networking, South Wales Networking). It fetches nothing behind a login, submits no forms and stores no personal data. Each listing links to the organiser's own page for booking.

How often

• Once a night, between about 01:00 and 02:00 UK time, one request to each events page.
• Never more than one request to a site every four seconds, and never more than 80 requests to a site in a night. Pages are cached for 20 hours, so the same page is not fetched twice.
• It reads robots.txt and honours Crawl-delay, Disallow for its name, and Retry-After.
• If a site refuses it, it stops for at least twelve hours before trying once more.

How to recognise it

User-Agent: NetworkingNetwork-EventBot/1.0 (+https://www.networkingnetwork.co.uk/crawler)

Address: 198.244.233.46.

To allow it

Some hosting firewalls challenge every visitor from a server address, which stops the bot reading your events page and keeps your meetings off the listing. Allowing the address above in your firewall fixes that. On 20i hosting: My20i, Manage Hosting, Security, StackProtect, add the address to the allow list. On Cloudflare: Security, WAF, Tools, IP Access Rules, Allow. If you would rather we read a feed than a page, an iCal or RSS address sent through our contact form is better still.

To exclude it

Add to your robots.txt:

User-agent: NetworkingNetwork-EventBot
Disallow: /

or tell us through our contact form and we will take your site off the list the same day.

Operated by Wingenious Ltd, North Wales.