Bot information

About our crawler

If you're reading this, you probably found a request from DroomDesignBot in your server logs. This page explains what it is and how to stop it.

Who runs it

Droom, a one-person web design studio in Vancouver, BC. It's run by Joe. There is a real person at hello@droom.ca who reads that inbox and will answer you.

What it does

It fetches a small number of public pages from Canadian small-business websites (usually the homepage and one or two others) to assess how the site performs and whether it's showing its age. If it looks like a site I could meaningfully improve, I may rebuild the homepage as a free sample and email it to the business.

It reads only pages that are publicly available. It does not attempt logins, does not submit forms, does not follow links behind authentication, and does not collect personal information beyond business contact details already published on the site.

How it behaves

Obeys robots.txt, including Crawl-delay
Waits at least 1.5 seconds between requests to the same site
Never more than 8 requests running at once, across all sites
Identifies itself honestly in the User-Agent, with this URL and a working email address
Visits a given site rarely: typically once, occasionally twice

How to be excluded

Option 1: robots.txt. Add this to the file at the root of your site:

User-agent: DroomDesignBot
Disallow: /

Option 2: just ask. Email hello@droom.ca with your domain and I'll add it to a permanent exclusion list. No explanation needed, and you won't hear from me again.

If you'd rather not be emailed

Any email you receive from me includes a one-click unsubscribe link and my mailing address, as Canadian anti-spam law requires. Using it removes you permanently. Emailing me directly works just as well.