Technology

58550 readers

4432 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

460

TikTok’s parent launched a web scraper that’s gobbling up the world’s online data 25-times faster than OpenAI (fortune.com)

submitted 1 day ago by LuuTuyen@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

88 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 13 points 13 hours 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.