About RinkIndexBot

RinkIndexBot is the automated collector behind RinkIndex, a free public directory of hockey in Western New York and the Rochester area. It reads the published schedule pages of rinks, associations and the booking platforms they use, so that a parent looking for a public skate or a learn-to-play session on a Tuesday night can find yours without knowing your rink's name first.

It is not an archiver, a price scraper, or an AI training crawler. It reads programme schedules and nothing else. Every event we publish records the source it came from, and where you provide a registration link we send people straight to it rather than trying to keep them here.

Public programme listings only: the title, date, time, age or skill band, and price of sessions the general public may attend and pay for — public skate, stick and puck, drop-in, learn to skate, clinics, camps, tryouts, tournaments and adult leagues.

Rink platforms typically publish one calendar for two audiences, so the same public feed that carries your public skate also carries private ice rentals, team practices and birthday parties booked under a customer's name. We run every item through an allowlist before anything is stored: an event is kept only if its title matches a known public-programme pattern, and it is dropped outright if it carries any marker of a private booking. Dropped events are not queued, not stored and not reviewed by a person — a review queue full of customers' names is still a database of customers' names.

We do not collect names of individuals, contact details of your customers, login-protected content, or anything behind a paywall. The crawler never creates an account, never signs in, and never starts a registration or checkout. Where a booking platform serves its public schedule through a query endpoint rather than a plain page, we send that platform's own read-only request for a date range — the same call its public widget makes when a visitor opens your calendar.

Once a night, at 06:00 UTC — between 1:00 and 2:00 AM Eastern, depending on the time of year. A normal visit is a handful of requests to your schedule pages — paginated feeds are fetched with a deliberate pause of roughly half a second to a second and a half between pages, and each source is capped at a small number of pages per run. There is no continuous polling and no second pass during the day.

If it looks like more than that in your logs, something is misconfigured on our side and we want to know. Email us and we will stop that source the same day.

Email contact@rinkindex.com from an address at your organization's domain, or use the report form, and tell us the domain to stop crawling. We remove the source and delete the listings that came from it. You do not have to give a reason, and we will not argue with you about it.

You can also block us yourself, without waiting on us. Denying the User-Agent above at your CDN, firewall or WAF takes effect on the next run and needs nothing from our side.

A robots.txt rule is a clear signal and we will act on it — but be aware of what it is and is not. Our crawler does not currently read robots.txt, so the block below is a message to a person rather than a switch that flips tonight. If you need us gone immediately, block the User-Agent or email us; if you are documenting your intent for every crawler, this is the right thing to write:

User-agent: RinkIndexBot
Disallow: /

If your listing is fine but a specific detail is wrong — a stale price, a session that no longer runs, a name we got from an out-of-date page — the report form is the fastest route to a correction. Those go to a person.

contact@rinkindex.com — for exclusion requests, corrections, or anything the crawler is doing that you would rather it did not. Our privacy policy covers what happens to data once it is on the site.