RESPECTFUL BOT POLICY SPECIFICATION

SparksDigitalBot/1.0 — Public Civic Transparency Policy

Published & maintained by Sparks Digital LLC (Brownsburg & Fort Wayne, Indiana) at https://www.digisparks.net/bot.

User-Agent: SparksDigitalBot/1.0 (+https://www.digisparks.net/bot; garrett@digisparks.net)

1. Operator Identity

Operator: Sparks Digital LLC (Fort Wayne & Brownsburg, Indiana)
Direct Inquiries & Webmaster Contact: garrett@digisparks.net · (317) 832-4840

2. Purpose

SparksDigitalBot/1.0 is a polite, low-frequency civic research agent operated in partnership with our AI systems at Sparks Digital LLC for public records transparency, civic accessibility auditing, and public purchasing market analysis under the Indiana Access to Public Records Act (APRA, Indiana Code § 5-14-3). Whenever available, we prioritize official RSS/Atom feeds, public OData/REST APIs, and bulk open-data exports over web crawling.

3. Strict Pacing & Technical Guarantees

  • Strict RFC 9309 robots.txt Adherence: Before requesting any URL, our crawler inspects /robots.txt using standard parser rules. If a path is disallowed or if a custom Crawl-delay is specified, those rules are strictly obeyed.
  • Polite Token-Bucket Rate Limiter (0.2 req/sec max): Requests are strictly paced to a maximum of 0.2 requests per second (at most 1 request every 5.0 seconds per host IP), ensuring zero performance impact on municipal or community servers.
  • Automatic 30-Minute Cooldown: Upon receiving any HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) or 503 (Service Unavailable) response, our agent immediately pauses all requests to that domain for at least 30 minutes.
  • Bandwidth Optimization (Conditional Caching): Uses HTTP HEAD checks and conditional ETag / If-Modified-Since headers to avoid re-downloading unchanged public documents (0 bytes transferred on HTTP 304 Not Modified).
  • Zero Proxy / Zero Evasion: All requests originate transparently with our full SparksDigitalBot/1.0 User-Agent header. We never use proxy rotation, TLS spoofing, or firewall evasion.

4. 60-Minute Opt-Out Mechanism for Webmasters

Any municipal or organizational webmaster may disallow indexing at any time by adding standard robots.txt rules to their site: 

User-agent: SparksDigitalBot
Disallow: /

SparksDigitalBot/1.0 automatically respects all robots.txt updates within 60 minutes. You may also request immediate domain exclusion by emailing garrett@digisparks.net or calling (317) 832-4840.