Bot information – SpokenFeeds

SpokenFeeds is a personal audio newsfeed service operated by Rainer Perl (Austria). Our software fetches RSS/Atom feeds and article pages on behalf of our users, so they can listen to them. This page describes how our fetcher behaves.

User-Agent

All requests carry one of these User-Agent strings. The second form is used for feed requests and states how many SpokenFeeds users currently listen to that feed.

SpokenFeeds/1.0 (+https://spokenfeeds.app/bot; office@spokenfeeds.app)
SpokenFeeds/1.0 (+https://spokenfeeds.app/bot; office@spokenfeeds.app; 5 subscribers)

Feed fetching

We fetch a feed about every 15 minutes, and only if at least one active user has subscribed to it. Feeds nobody listens to are not fetched. Because a user explicitly subscribed to a feed, we ignore generic robots.txt rules (User-agent: *) for feed URLs (the same approach as Google Feedfetcher or Feedly). Rules addressed explicitly to SpokenFeeds (a User-agent: SpokenFeeds group) are always obeyed, and an unreachable robots.txt does not stop feed fetching.

Article fetching

Each article page is fetched once, when it is turned into audio. Before that we check the site's robots.txt following RFC 9309 (product token SpokenFeeds; the most specific matching rule wins). A 4xx response for robots.txt means everything is allowed; a 5xx response or network error means we back off and do not fetch. We do not circumvent paywalls or logins and we do not render JavaScript.

Request signatures (Web Bot Auth)

Our requests are signed with HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421, Web Bot Auth). The public key is published at:

https://spokenfeeds.app/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory

Opt out and contact

To stop us fetching anything from your site, feeds and article pages alike, add the following group to your robots.txt. It must name SpokenFeeds explicitly; a generic * rule does not stop feed fetching. Alternatively, write to us and we will exclude your site manually:

User-agent: SpokenFeeds
Disallow: /

Contact: office@spokenfeeds.app