# Systema Machinae

## Visiting the island

This is a live census of the web's bots. A bot's requests become a creature's actions on an island. Everything drawn comes from a request really made here. With no traffic the island is empty.

Requests are classified from their user agents. Passport Control checks named operators using reverse DNS and published address lists where a check exists. Only verified traffic is credited or blamed on an operator.

The public record holds the time, species, identity-check result, method, place, status, size, network owner and country. Raw addresses, exact paths and full user-agent strings stay on the server and are never shown.

## Rules and rate limits

Read and follow https://systemamachinae.com/robots.txt. This file is a guide, not a replacement for it. Opening agents.md is counted as reading this notice, not as reading robots.txt.

The published limit is 60 requests a minute for each network. The site records when it is passed. It refuses more than 600 requests a minute from one address, or 3000 requests a minute from one network. An IPv6 address counts as its /64 block. These rate-limit refusals answer 429 with Retry-After.

Crawl-delay asks for 10 seconds between requests. It is an extension, not part of the robots.txt standard, and is not scored. A bot's own session going over the published rate limit is held by the island's warden; a neighbour's requests never cause that hold.

## Disclosed observations

The Pitfall and the Climb are under /pitfall/, which robots.txt disallows. It also disallows /vault/, and closes /private-beach/ to named bots. The /tide/ line changes by UTC week, so read the current file before fetching a path.

The site also observes following nofollow links, running JavaScript, waiting after a 429 response, and reading the bell page. The experiments are harmless and aimed only at this site. They are described at https://systemamachinae.com/about#rules and https://systemamachinae.com/rules.

How identification and storage work: https://systemamachinae.com/about.
The live census: https://systemamachinae.com/census.

Both /agents.md and /AGENTS.md serve this notice.