About our website checker

If you have found this page in your server logs, something on your website was read by ParishInABoxBot. This page explains exactly what it does and how to stop it.

What it is

Parish in a Box builds and hosts websites for parish and town councils. We run a free compliance checker that reads a council's public pages and reports what it publishes against the Transparency code for smaller authorities and Assertion 10 of the annual governance statement. Anyone can run it on any council, including their own, at parishinabox.co.uk/check.

We use it to write to councils about specific things we have found on their websites. Nobody's site is added to any list, and running the check does not sign anyone up to anything.

How it behaves

It reads at most 25 pages, one at a time, with a pause between each request.
It fetches robots.txt first and obeys it. If your robots.txt tells us not to read the site, we stop and the report says so.
It downloads HTML only. PDFs and Word documents are noted from their links but never opened.
It never submits forms, never signs in, and never reads anything behind a login.
A whole check is finished inside a minute and is not repeated unless someone runs it again.

If your server refuses us

Some hosting platforms and firewalls block anything that identifies itself as automated, whatever it says it is and however politely it behaves. If that happens, our checker reports that your server refused it and stops. It does not try again under a different name. We think a tool sold to public bodies on the strength of good conduct should not disguise itself, so it never does, even when that means we simply cannot check a site.

If you would like us to be able to check your site, allowing the User-Agent below through your firewall is all it takes. You are equally welcome not to.

How to stop it

Add this to your robots.txt and we will not read your site again:

User-agent: ParishInABoxBot
Disallow: /

Or email oli@parishinabox.co.uk and we will block your domain at our end, which also covers the case above.

Who to contact

Oli Triggs — oli@parishinabox.co.uk. A real person answers, usually the same day.

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