PublishMeBot

01What it reads

PublishMeBot is the program PublishMe uses to read news that newsrooms are allowed to republish. It reads only:

• press releases from government and public bodies whose own terms allow anyone to reproduce them, such as the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO);
• PB-SHABD, Prasar Bharati’s news service, for newsrooms that have registered with PB-SHABD themselves and connected their own account to PublishMe.

It doesn’t read other websites, and it doesn’t collect personal information.

02How it identifies itself

Every request carries this user agent:

PublishMeBot/1.0 (+https://publishme.in/bot)

It never pretends to be a web browser. If a site turns PublishMeBot away, it stays away; we ask the site’s owner instead.

03How it behaves

• It follows the site’s robots.txt, read again once a day.
• It sends one request at a time to a site, at least two seconds apart.
• It checks a site’s list of releases every 10 to 30 minutes and reads only what’s new since the last time.
• While a site keeps failing, it waits longer and longer between attempts, up to several hours.

04What happens to what it reads

Newsrooms publish the stories on their own websites under the source’s terms: accurately, not in a misleading context, and with the source named and linked where the terms ask for it. PB-SHABD stories are published as filed, with their original date and time.

Photos are taken only from the source itself. Anything the source marks as belonging to someone else is left out.

05How to limit or block it

To keep PublishMeBot away from all or part of your site, add a group for it to your robots.txt:

User-agent: PublishMeBot
Disallow: /

To ask us to read less often, to stop, or to read through an official feed instead, write to [email protected]. We’ll do what you ask.