yanks-registry-scout
If you found yanks-registry-scout in your logs: it is the source monitor of Yanks Registry, a moderated public catalog of audio software. It looks for new releases and products of the plugins in the catalog -- in vendors' feeds, changelogs, download pages and GitHub releases, and in the news feeds of a few music-technology sites.
What it does
- It reads only the pages a moderator added as a source, each at most every few hours (feeds) to once a week (other pages), with a conditional request (
If-None-Match/If-Modified-Since) so an unchanged page costs you almost nothing. - One request at a time per site, with a pause of several seconds between requests; no JavaScript, no images, no following of links.
- It keeps facts -- a product name, a version, a date, a short quote and the link -- for a moderator to check. Nothing it finds is published without a person accepting it, and it does not keep copies of your articles.
- It never pretends to be a browser. If your site answers with a block page, it stops and asks again in a week.
How to stop it
It obeys robots.txt. Its product token is yanks-registry-scout:
User-agent: yanks-registry-scout Disallow: /
A rule for * applies to it as well, unless a group names it directly.