• @affiliate
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    214 months ago

    from the article:

    Robots.txt is a line of code that publishers can put into a website that, while not legally binding in any way, is supposed to signal to scraper bots that they cannot take that website’s data.

    i do understand that robots.txt is a very minor part of the article, but i think that’s a pretty rough explanation of robots.txt

      • @affiliate
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        194 months ago

        i would probably word it as something like:

        Robots.txt is a document that specifies which parts of a website bots are and are not allowed to visit. While it’s not a legally binding document, it has long been common practice for bots to obey the rules listed in robots.txt.

        in that description, i’m trying to keep the accessible tone that they were going for in the article (so i wrote “document” instead of file format/IETF standard), while still trying to focus on the following points:

        • robots.txt is fundamentally a list of rules, not a single line of code
        • robots.txt can allow bots to access certain parts of a website, it doesn’t have to ban bots entirely
        • it’s not legally binding, but it is still customary for bots to follow it

        i did also neglect to mention that robots.txt allows you to specify different rules for different bots, but that didn’t seem particularly relevant here.

      • @[email protected]
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        fedilink
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        54 months ago

        List of files/pages that a website owner doesn’t want bots to crawl. Or something like that.

        • @NiHaDuncan
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          4 months ago

          Websites actually just list broad areas, as listing every file/page would be far too verbose for many websites and impossible for any website that has dynamic/user-generated content.

          You can view examples by going to most any websites base-url and then adding /robots.txt to the end of it.

          For example www.google.com/robots.txt

    • Echo Dot
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      54 months ago

      It’s literally a text document it’s not even “a line of code”.