WeChessUpBot

WeChessUp publishes a public directory of over-the-board chess tournaments in the United States, so that a player can find events near them. Some of that directory is built by reading tournament calendars that organisers have already published. This page describes exactly what our crawler does, and how to stop it.

It is operated by CoreSync Technology Inc., a Massachusetts corporation, at 148 Concord Road, Wayland, MA 01778, United States.

How to identify it

Every request we make carries this user agent, and nothing else does:

WeChessUpBot/1.0 (+https://wechessup.com/bot; bot@wechessup.com)

How to make it stop

Email bot@wechessup.com and say so. You do not have to explain, justify, or discuss it. We will stop fetching your site and remove your events from the directory within 24 hours. There is no appeal process because there is nothing to appeal — it is your site.

Or, if you would rather not email anyone, add this to your robots.txt and we will obey it:

User-agent: WeChessUpBot
Disallow: /

What it fetches, and how often

• One request every 3 seconds at most, and never more than one at a time to the same site. For smaller sites the default is one every 10 seconds, and we slow down further if a page takes more than about a second to answer — a slow page means it is being built for us rather than served from a cache, and that costs you real work.
• Once a day at most, usually overnight US Eastern, and weekly for most sites. Tournament calendars change over days, not minutes.
• Conditional requests. We send If-Modified-Since, so if nothing has changed your server answers 304 and sends no page at all.
• No cookies, ever. We do not store or send them. Sending a cookie back would push our requests out of your anonymous page cache and make each one cost you significantly more.
• No browser. We fetch the HTML and parse it. We do not load your CSS, JavaScript, fonts or images, which is roughly forty times less traffic than a visitor.
• Hard caps. Every run stops after 200 requests, or 10 minutes, or 40 pages, whichever comes first. If your server answers 429 or 503, we abandon the run immediately and do not try again until the next day. Three failures in a row and we stop and raise an alert on our side.

In practice this means a typical day is under a hundred requests spread over a few minutes — less traffic than one person opening your calendar page once in a browser.

What it stores

Facts about events, and nothing else: the event name, its dates, the venue and city, the sections offered, entry fees, prize funds, time control, number of rounds, rating type, the organiser’s name, and the URL to register or read more.

We do not republish your writing. Descriptive text you wrote about your event is yours. Where a listing needs a sentence, we generate it from the structured details above. Every listing sourced from another site names that site and links back to the original page, because sending you the visitor is the entire point.

We do not fetch anything behind a login, we do not work around rate limits, and we do not use any of this to train machine-learning models.

If it is your event

Every listing we did not receive directly carries a “claim it” link. Claiming an event lets you correct it, add sections, or take it down. Listing a tournament with us is free, and remains free whether or not you ever use anything else we make.

If we got something wrong

Wrong date, wrong venue, an event that was cancelled, or a listing that should never have appeared — email bot@wechessup.com. A person reads it.