Amber Crawler

Amber is my personal web archiver. If you found this page from a User-Agent string in your server logs, this is the crawler that visited you.

About

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Amber keeps versioned, replayable copies of websites I read. The idea is to have my own personal Wayback Machine that I can use to look at historical content without getting slammed by Wayback Machine's onerous rate limits. I also index these pages so that I have a personal search engine to work with.

It identifies itself as:

amber/1.0 (personal archiver; +https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Amber_Crawler; [email protected])

Requests come from 64.71.176.178.

Behavior

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  • It obeys robots.txt, including Crawl-delay.
    • It fetches that file once per crawl and uses the cached copy
    • It looks for the amber User-Agent token before every fetch but if you mark *, it will obey that too.
  • It is slow by default: at most about three requests per second per host, with jitter, and typically far less. Crawls are capped in number of pages and bytes.
  • It obeys HTTP 429/503 and Retry-After with exponential backoff.
  • It is GET only, so won't submit forms etc.

Opting Out

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Add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: amber
Disallow: /

If you want a hard-ban or have complaints, email me at [email protected]