VSBot — crawler information

VSBot is operated by Valsight GmbH, a German maker of business planning and simulation software. It scans publicly reachable websites for information about the companies behind them — the Handelsregister number that §5 DDG requires a commercial site to publish, the address alongside it, and what the site says the business does — so that an entry in the register can be matched to its own website and described. It reads only what is public, and only what robots.txt allows.

Operator

Organisation

Valsight GmbH, Friedrichstraße 236, 10969 Berlin

Contact

it@valsight.com

User-Agent

VSBot/4.0

If you found this address in your server log, that request was ours. The code after ?c= belongs to that one visit of ours — it is not about you, and not about anyone who visits your site. Where we still hold the record, this page names the site we fetched and when.

What is collected

What the site says about the company

the Handelsregister court and number, the postal address and VAT id as published on your legal notice, and what the site says the business does

The text of the pages we read

kept as it was read, so an extracted value can be checked against its source rather than trusted

The request itself

the URL, the date, and the address the request was answered from

What is not collected

• Nothing is read that robots.txt disallows, and nothing behind a login or a paywall is read at all.
• No cookies are set, no forms are submitted, and nothing is ever POSTed. Only GET requests are made.
• Nothing is collected about the people who visit your site. The code after ?c= identifies one visit of ours, not any of theirs.

How to exclude this crawler

Add the following to /robots.txt. It is honoured on the next request; the crawler re-reads robots.txt per host and does not cache it beyond a single run.

User-agent: VSBot
Disallow: /

A Crawl-delay for this user-agent is also honoured. To exclude only the legal notice, disallow that path instead.

Politeness

• A handful of requests per site: /robots.txt, the front page, and pages the site links to such as its Impressum. The robots.txt is read once per host and reused for every site on it.
• Only GET, only http and https, and responses are read up to a fixed size limit and then dropped.

If this crawler has caused a problem on your site, write to it@valsight.com and it will be excluded on request.

Impressum — Angaben gemäß § 5 DDG

Valsight GmbH · Friedrichstraße 236 · 10969 Berlin · Deutschland · Vertretungsberechtigter Geschäftsführer: Khai Tran

Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, HRB 184583 B · USt-IdNr.: DE299143639 · Telefon: +49 30 46799044 · E-Mail: info@valsight.com