MeraFamBot reads public event calendars.

MeraFam lists free library programmes and family events in about 160 US cities, so parents can find what is on this weekend. MeraFamBot is the reader that fetches those calendars. Every listing links back to the organiser’s own page.

How it identifies itself

Every request carries this User-Agent, and robots.txt rules address it by the token MeraFamBot:

MeraFamBot/1.0 (+https://merafam.com/bot)

A User-Agent can be copied by anyone, so the reader also signs every request (Web Bot Auth, HTTP Message Signatures). Its public key is published at /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory, and a request without a valid signature from that key is not us.

What it reads

• Public event calendars of libraries, museums, zoos, science and nature centres and children’s theatres: a calendar feed (.ics), the event endpoint of a library calendar platform, or a public events page.
• For each event: its title, date and time, place, a short description and its link. No images, no personal data, nothing behind a login.

How often

• Once a night, between 05:00 and 10:00 UTC. A site that turns the reader away is retried once a week, not nightly.
• One request at a time to any one site. It never opens parallel connections to the same host.
• A Crawl-delay in robots.txt is kept. If it asks for more than a minute between requests, the reader stops for the night and continues another night.
• When a venue is first added, it fetches the venue’s homepage once to find the events page.

The robots.txt rules it keeps

• Web pages are crawled only where robots.txt allows. That covers events pages, homepages, an event’s own page, and pages opened in a browser to read the calendar they load. The group naming MeraFamBot applies if there is one, otherwise *. If robots.txt cannot be reached at all, nothing on the site is crawled until it can.
• A calendar feed is read the way a calendar app reads one. When we are pointed at a published .ics feed or a library platform’s event feed, MeraFamBot fetches it as Apple Calendar or Google Calendar would for a subscriber. Rules for * do not stop that. A rule that names MeraFamBot always does.

To stop it

Add this to your robots.txt. It takes effect within a day:

User-agent: MeraFamBot
Disallow: /

Or write to support@merafam.com and we will remove your site by hand.

To allow it

If your site uses Cloudflare or another bot shield, it may be turning the reader away without anyone deciding to. The nightly reader runs on a cloud host, and bot shields treat cloud traffic as suspect by default. To let your events appear, you can add a rule that skips bot protection for requests whose User-Agent contains MeraFamBot. Or send us your calendar feed address and we will read that instead. If you run a venue, the This is my venue page reaches a person.