Trackplanner-Feed: our price bot

Trackplanner (app.trackplanner.io) is a planner for model railway layouts. From a finished plan the app builds a bill of materials. For the track and accessories on that list it shows prices, availability and links to shops that sell them.

The Trackplanner-Feed bot collects this data from model railway shops. This page explains how to recognise it, what it reads, and how to block it or let it through.

How to recognise it

  • User agent: Trackplanner-Feed/1.0 (+https://trackplanner.io/haendler)
  • robots.txt token: trackplanner-feed
  • Signature: every request is signed with HTTP Message Signatures following Web Bot Auth (Ed25519), with the header Signature-Agent: "https://trackplanner.io". The public keys are listed in the key directory.

A second, smaller job checks whether products can still be found in a shop. It identifies itself as TrackplannerPresenceBot/1.0 (+https://trackplanner.io; info@trackplanner.io), robots.txt token TrackplannerPresenceBot.

What it reads

  • Prices, availability and product links of track and accessories.
  • Where a shop offers an official feed (Google Merchant Center, an affiliate network or a partner spreadsheet), the bot reads that feed instead of product pages.
  • It never logs in, never puts items in a cart and collects no personal data.

How often

  • Runs start at night and early in the morning (between 01:40 and 06:15 UTC). Most shops see only a few requests a day, spaced at least one second apart.
  • It checks product pages once a week, on Mondays.

How it behaves

  • It reads robots.txt first and follows Disallow and Crawl-delay from the group for trackplanner-feed, or from the group for * if there is none, unless the shop has explicitly allowed us to fetch.
  • When it fetches pages, it sends at most one request per second to the same host.
  • It follows at most 5 redirects.
  • It checks each shop’s terms of use. If they forbid automated access, it stops, unless the shop has agreed.

For shop operators

Block the bot

Add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: trackplanner-feed
Disallow: /

The bot reads robots.txt again every day and stops fetching from your shop. To block the smaller presence check as well, use the token TrackplannerPresenceBot the same way.

Let the bot through a firewall or Cloudflare

Send a feed instead

If you would rather send us your prices as a feed than have pages fetched, write to info@trackplanner.io.

Which retailer data the app uses and how it ranks offers is described on the retailer overview.

Operator

Trackplanner, email info@trackplanner.io. Legal details in the imprint.