Aboutus:Bot

The AboutUs Bot

The AboutUs:Bot gathers descriptive public information about a website from several sources (such as the whois record) to build a domain page. This pre-built wiki page gives website owners and AboutUs contributors a head-start in creating a useful and informative AboutUs.org page. For more information try a tour of AboutUs and wiki.

How do I prevent the bot from gathering info about my site

Using a robots.txt file, you can choose not to have your future AboutUs.org pages initialized with selected content from your website. This doesn't mean that we won't create a Wiki Page for your website. Our users should still have the opportunity to contribute their own content describing your site, as well as adding their own reviews.

To prevent the AboutUs:Bot from collecting your site content in the future, please include the following lines in your /robots.txt file.

User-agent: AboutUsBot

Disallow: /

The AboutUs:Bot will include the following in it's User-Agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AboutUsBot/0.9; +http://www.aboutus.org/AboutUsBot)

Please note that the current AboutUs Bot behavior is to visit each site only once to initialize the AboutUs.org page.

Other supported bot prevention methods

The AboutUs:Bot will also honor a rule like this in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Yet another alternative would be to add either of these tags to your main page:

These should give you plenty of ways to prevent AboutUsBot from including content from your site when creating new AboutUs.org pages.

What about my address?

Even though your address may be publicly available in various Whois services, if your website has a robots.txt file that denies access to AboutUs:Bot, we will honor your intentions and not publish your contact details on your AboutUs.org page.

Please be aware that if we have already published your address, it was because it was easily available to us through a popular 3rd party API service. Your address is probably completely visible in your WHOIS record, and if you want your address to be kept private in the future, you should probably subscribe to an address protection service at your registrar.

How do I remove my AboutUs.org page?

If you completely erase your WikiPage content, our editors will consider it vandalism and restore the page. If you would like to remove the content created by the bot (Title & Description) and contact details (Address & Contact), please only remove the content in those sections. Other sections, including the reviews, thumbnail, language, external links, and user-contributed content should remain. See No Bot Policy for more information.