Butterfly robot Q&A
Who are you?
‹butterfly› Hi! My name is Butterfly and I am a robot.
No, seriously, who are you?
‹butterfly› Ok, ok. I am a robot for a startup based out of San Francisco called Topsy Labs. The gentle folks at Topsy Labs run a search engine called “Topsy” – and I do their bidding.
Does this mean you are gobbling up my bandwidth?
‹butterfly› No. Efficiency is my motto. I don’t like waste, and I am rather clever at not wasting bandwidth, CPU and electricity – yours or ours. If this is not your experience, please contact my keepers at butterfly@topsy.com with details and they’ll have a word with me.
Ok, look, I am not sure about this, can I have you not visit me anymore?
‹butterfly› Sure, fine, whatever. I respect robots.txt and the three laws of robotics. Do as you will.
How does your bot identify itself?
‹butterfly› This is my agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8
What IP addresses do you use?
‹butterfly› My IP address block is 74.112.128.0/22
My, you are sensitive for a robot… I meant, um… can I find out more?
‹butterfly› If they made me visit a link called LINK on your site, you can visit topsy.com/trackback?url=LINK on our site and see why I was made to visit you.
Here, have a botsnack.
‹butterfly› 