What Rink Hopper reads, and how
Rink Hopper runs a small program that reads rink schedules so skaters can find drop-in ice. If you run a rink or a scheduling service and found it in your logs, this page is for you.
How to recognise it
Every request it makes carries this User-Agent:
rinkhopper-pull/<version> (+https://rinkhopper.com/bot)
A site that turns away anything not shaped like a browser gets the same name and address inside the form browsers use, a line that starts Mozilla/5.0 (compatible.
It never hides that name, never uses other addresses or proxies to get around a block, and never pretends to be a person.
What it reads
Only what a rink publishes for the public: schedule pages, public calendar feeds, posted PDFs, and the schedule a rink's own public booking page loads in a visitor's browser. If a person with a web browser and no account can see it, the reader may read it.
What it never does
- Log in, create an account at a rink, or use a rink's staff tools.
- Read anything about a rink's customers: names, registrations, rosters, payments. Booking systems often offer those next to the schedule. The reader never asks for them.
- Read a rental calendar that names who rented the ice. The drop-in schedule is the source.
- Book, hold or buy anything. Every session on Rink Hopper links to the rink's own page.
- Keep a rink's text or images beyond the facts of a session: what it is, when, the price, a short note and the link.
- Write anything to a rink's site. It only reads.
How often
| Source | How often, at most |
|---|---|
| Calendar feeds and booking pages | Every 15 minutes, never twice within 10 |
| PDFs and pages posted by hand | Once a day |
| A fresh read someone asks for | Not if the source was read within its usual wait |
robots.txt
The reader treats robots.txt as a rink's preference about automated indexing. A schedule a rink publishes for the public is public, and Rink Hopper links every session back to the rink. A rink that would rather not be read at all can say so, below, and it will be left alone.
Opting out
Write to us with Opt my rink out as the topic, from an address at the rink, or ask us to call the front desk number the rink publishes. The reader stops, the rink's sessions come off every board, feed and session page, and the rink stays on the list of rinks only as its name and town with a link to its own site, so skaters still know it exists. The opt-out is written down with its date, so it lasts.
A time is wrong
Write to us with the session and what the rink's own page says. A wrong time is fixed in the reader itself, so it stays fixed.
For scheduling services
Most rinks publish through a few scheduling services. If you run one and want the reader to stop, block its User-Agent or write to us. Rink Hopper honours that the same day, for every rink on your service, with no workaround. We will tell those rinks what happened and offer them a way to publish their schedule to Rink Hopper themselves.
Security
Found a problem? Write to security@rinkhopper.com. The details are in security.txt.