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AnoncracyBot

When someone shares a link on Anoncracy, we fetch information about that page for a preview card: the headline, a short description, the site’s name and icon, and its main picture. Every card links to your page. Our own crawler is AnoncracyBot; some previews also use the service described below.

How to recognize it

Its user agent starts with AnoncracyBot/1.0 followed by a link to this page. It never uses another crawler’s name.

What our crawler fetches

  • Your robots.txt first. Its rules are cached for up to a day per site.
  • The shared page itself: the first 512 KB of its HTML, read for its Open Graph and Twitter tags, its title and description, and any article details in JSON-LD.
  • The page’s main image (up to 2 MB) and its icon. We serve our own resized copies, so viewing the preview card does not contact your site.
  • The same page again an hour later and a day later, to pick up corrected headlines. It may retry failed requests or check again when someone shares the link later.

Our crawler fetches at most 6 pages a minute from any one site. It never runs scripts, sends or keeps cookies, or signs in, and only visits public addresses on the standard web ports.

When a preview is unavailable

If a public page returns 403 (Forbidden) to our crawler, we may send its URL to Microlink for preview details such as the headline, description, author, publication date, site name, image and icon. We check your robots rules before doing so. This fallback is not used for disallowed pages, private addresses, sign-in-required (401) responses or rate-limit (429) responses.

Microlink makes a separate fetch; the crawler limits above describe AnoncracyBot’s own requests. Images still pass through our image checks and are served from our own copies. We do not add members’ account details, sign-in cookies or private messages to the lookup. The shared URL can include query parameters. See Microlink’s privacy policy.

How to opt out

AnoncracyBot follows robots.txt. To keep it away from your whole site, add:

User-agent: AnoncracyBot
Disallow: /

You can also disallow only some paths. We cache robots rules for up to a day and apply updated rules on subsequent fetches; a rule change does not immediately remove an existing preview. When a fetch is disallowed, the link still works as a plain card with your domain and no preview. For questions about a cached preview, contact us below.

Questions

Tell us through the feedback page.