Rally's event fetcher

Rally finds real events so a new town does not look empty: a trivia night, a run club, a show. This page says what our fetcher reads, how it behaves, and how to tell it to stop.

Who we are

Requests from Rally say so in the user agent:

RallyFoundEvents/1.0 (+https://letsrallytonight.com/bot; letsrallytonight@gmail.com)

Rally is an app for meeting people at public events and places. Zach Asbury runs it. If something looks wrong, email letsrallytonight@gmail.com and a person will answer.

What it reads

Official event APIs, under their own keys and terms.
Public calendar feeds a site publishes for subscription (iCal, RSS, Localist, WordPress Events Calendar).
Public event pages that anyone can open without logging in.

It keeps facts only: the name, the time, the place and a link back to your page. It does not copy descriptions, photos or logos.

How it behaves

It follows robots.txt. If your robots.txt disallows the path, Rally does not fetch it. If robots.txt cannot be read, Rally does not fetch the page.
It honors Crawl-delay, and otherwise waits at least a second between requests to the same site.
It never logs in, never fills in a form, and never opens a page that needs an account.
It stops at a bot check. If a site answers with a challenge, a CAPTCHA or a block, Rally stops, leaves that site alone for a day, and does not retry with a different address, different headers or a different user agent. It never tries to solve or get around a check.
It leaves out the big social and ticket platforms that do not allow it. Those are reached only the allowed way: through a connected account or because someone shared a link to us.
It reads public addresses only, over https.

How to opt out

Any one of these works, and we act within a day:

Add a rule for our name to your robots.txt. Our own rule beats the general one:
```
User-agent: RallyFoundEvents
Disallow: /
```
Or email letsrallytonight@gmail.com with your website, and we add it to a list our fetcher checks before every request. Events already found from your site are hidden.

To have a single event or a whole venue taken off Rally, see How Rally lists events.

What we keep

A short log of which sites we asked and how it went (the site name, the result and the date). Nothing about any person, and it is deleted after thirty days.