What FestroBot is
FestroBot is the crawler Festro uses to keep a Montréal event calendar current. It reads the public events pages and calendar feeds of venues and organizers so that what is happening tonight in the city is listed in one place, with a link back to whoever is selling the ticket.
It reads event facts — title, date and time, venue, price range, and the link to the source. It does not copy your artwork or your written descriptions, and it does not sell anything. If you found a Festro listing for your own event, the How your event got on Festro page is the one you want.
How to identify it
FestroBot sends this User-Agent header on every request: FestroBot/1.0 (+https://festro.com/crawler)
The product token — the word to use in `robots.txt` — is FestroBot. Requests come from Google Cloud infrastructure in North America; we do not publish a fixed IP range, so please match on the user-agent rather than on an address.
Anything claiming to be FestroBot that ignores the rules below is not us. If you see that, tell us — we would like to know as much as you would.
How to block it
FestroBot obeys `robots.txt`. To stop it reading your site entirely, add these two lines to the `robots.txt` file at the root of your domain:
- User-agent: FestroBot
- Disallow: /
To block only part of the site, use a path instead of `/` — for example `Disallow: /private/`. A `Crawl-delay:` directive is honoured too, and will only ever make us slower. Changes take effect within a day; we re-read `robots.txt` at least every 24 hours.
If we cannot reach your `robots.txt` at all — a server error, a timeout — we treat that as “do not crawl” and stop, rather than assuming permission. A missing file (a plain 404) means there are no restrictions, per the usual convention.
You do not have to edit a file if you would rather not: tell us through our removal form and we will turn your site off at our end, same day. See Correct or remove a listing.
How it behaves
- Slow. At least one second between requests to the same website, more if your `robots.txt` asks for it. A typical venue is read a handful of times a day at most. Licensed ticketing APIs are a separate path, queried under those programs' own rate limits — that is an API call, not crawling your site.
- Logged out. FestroBot never signs in, never uses an account, and never sends anyone's credentials or API key.
- Plain HTTP. It does not run JavaScript, submit forms, click buttons, or attempt to solve any challenge or CAPTCHA.
- Honest about failure. A 429 or a 5xx makes it back off. A block makes it stop, not try harder.
If FestroBot is causing measurable load on your server, that is a bug on our side. Tell us through our contact form and we will slow it down or switch it off while we look.
What we keep
From a public events page we keep the event facts and the URL we read them from. We keep a record of when we last checked, which is shown publicly on the listing so readers know how fresh it is. We do not keep copies of your pages beyond what is needed to extract those facts.
We also keep a dated copy of each source's `robots.txt` and public terms, so that our record of what a site permitted, and when, is a document rather than a memory.
Contact
Questions, complaints, or a request to stop: our contact form. A person reads it. If you are asking us to stop, we stop first and discuss afterwards — you do not need to send a formal notice to get a response.