Systema Machinae

A living census of the web's bots. First edition.

Nobody invited them. Bots land at Port 443 and are meant to queue at Customs. The rules are on the robots.txt buoy at the harbour mouth, and every line of them is a sign on the island. People watch from the promenade. Every creature here is a real bot visiting this site right now.

Island time --:--:--
-- watching from the promenade

Live. Events can appear a few seconds after they happen.

All species

Pixel drawing of curl

curl

Ringletus bouncius

Vagantes, the strays. Command-line tool.

A joke about the drawing A loose curl that bounces wherever it likes.

The line above plays on the name. It says nothing about how the bot behaves: everything below is read from the request log, for today and the 29 days before it, by UTC date.

Alignment

Insufficient data. A judgement needs at least 200 requests and 5 sessions in the trailing 30 days. This one would rest on all its sessions: 11 requests in 2 sessions over the trailing 30 days.

How the score is worked out, and the count behind every input, is on the Census page.

Who runs it, and how that is checked

Who runs it
Anyone with a terminal
A user-agent string it sends
curl/8.9.1
What it says it is for
curl is a command-line tool for fetching a URL. A person or a script is behind every request, and there is no operator to ask.

Everything above is a claim: the operator’s own account where it has published one, and a third party’s where it has not. This site has not tested it. What the bot has done is in the sections below, read from the request log.

No operator. Anyone can run it, so there is no identity for Customs to check, and its sessions are filed as undeclared.

The name it is matched on

A request is filed under this species when its user-agent string contains the product name curl as a whole word, in any mix of capitals. Where a string holds more than one product name, the longest wins, and a named bot wins over a library it is built on.

How to address this bot in robots.txt

A group in robots.txt addresses this bot by the line:

User-agent: curl

An example group. The path is a placeholder.

User-agent: curl
Disallow: /a-path/
Allow: /a-path/one-page

This is reference, not advice. Systema Machinae is not a bot-blocking product.

This site’s own robots.txt does not name it. The group for every bot applies.

Landings

2 landings in the trailing 30 days. A landing is the first request of a session.

By day

The same figures as a table
Landings on each of the last 30 days, UTC
DayUndeclared
9 Sep0
10 Sep0
11 Sep0
12 Sep0
13 Sep0
14 Sep0
15 Sep0
16 Sep0
17 Sep0
18 Sep0
19 Sep0
20 Sep0
21 Sep0
22 Sep0
23 Sep0
24 Sep0
25 Sep0
26 Sep0
27 Sep0
28 Sep0
29 Sep0
30 Sep0
1 Oct0
2 Oct0
3 Oct0
4 Oct0
5 Oct0
6 Oct0
7 Oct0
8 Oct2

By hour of the day, UTC

The same figures as a table
Landings in each hour of the UTC day, over the last 30 days
HourUndeclared
00:000
01:000
02:000
03:000
04:000
05:000
06:000
07:000
08:000
09:000
10:000
11:000
12:000
13:000
14:000
15:000
16:000
17:002
18:000
19:000
20:000
21:000
22:000
23:000

Busiest hour: 17:00 UTC, with 2 landings.

What it asks for

Part of the siteUndeclared requests
The island, on the home page4
Species pages2
Census pages1
robots.txt, on the buoy4

Parts of the site, from a fixed list. The address of a request is never shown.

Its record with each rule

Trailing 30 daysUndeclared
Sessions2
Requests11
Sessions that asked for anything besides robots.txt1
read robots.txt first1
had read it in the 24 hours before0
read it only afterwards0
did not read it0
Sessions that entered the Pitfall0
having read robots.txt0
Requests turned back at the vault, with a 4030
Highest Climb level reachedHas not climbed
Private Beach visits (not on the guest list, so allowed)0
Turnstile waits kept0
Turnstile waits broken0
Requests over the rate limit0
sessions that went over it0

These are counts, not a verdict. A session is judged on what it did inside the 30 days.

Customs

Customs does not check it. It names no operator, so there is no claim to test: 2 sessions filed as undeclared in the trailing 30 days.

Where it comes from

Undeclared sessions, the busiest 2
Network ownerCountrySessionsRequests
Cablevision Systems Corp.United States110
Unknown networkUnknown country11

Network owner and country only. An address is never shown.