How to recognise it
Every request carries the User-Agent TCGSwoopBot/1.0 (+https://tcgswoop.com/bot/). We never send a browser's User-Agent, never use proxies or rotating addresses, and never run a disguised browser.
What it reads
- Your robots.txt, at most once a day.
- Your product feed or sitemap, to find sealed trading-card products.
- Product pages and their structured data, for price, stock and delivery.
It never adds items to a basket, never logs in and never submits forms.
How politely it reads
- robots.txt is obeyed. A disallowed path is never requested.
- One request at a time per site, with a gap of 2 to 10 seconds between requests.
- A 429 or 503 response, or a Retry-After header, slows us down at once and we back off further on each repeat.
- A 403, a challenge page or any other sign that we are not welcome stops all checks on your site until a person has looked at it. We never try to get around a block.
Shopify shops
Shopify's bot protection turns away honest crawlers, so we ask Shopify shops that want to be listed to create a crawler access key for us (Online Store › Preferences › Crawler access). The key only lets us read your public pages, you can revoke it at any time, and we use it only on the domain it was issued for.
How to limit or block it
To block TCGSwoopBot entirely, add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: TCGSwoopBot
Disallow: /We will stop within a day and remove your listings. To be taken off the site, or to ask us to check less often, email [email protected] or use the page for shops.