pterion-bot

pterion-bot is the crawler behind pterion.uk, a non-commercial directory of UK medical, surgical, radiological and allied workshops and conferences. We aggregate factual event metadata (title, date, venue, registration link, CPD hours, price) from publicly published event listings and link traffic back to the original organiser.

How to identify it

The bot sends a fixed User-Agent header:

pterion-bot/0.1 (+https://pterion.uk/bot; contact@pterion.uk)

What it fetches

• Course and event listing pages from a curated set of organisers (Royal Colleges, specialty societies, accredited course providers).
• Individual event detail pages linked from those listings.
• /robots.txt (cached for 24 hours) and, where available, /sitemap.xml, JSON-LD Event blocks, ICS feeds, or RSS — we prefer these to HTML scraping when offered.

What it does not do

• Submit forms, log in, or pass through authentication walls.
• Re-publish full descriptions verbatim — we summarise and link out.
• Crawl past Disallow rules in robots.txt.
• Run JavaScript except where strictly necessary to enumerate URLs from a single-page app; never for content extraction.

Politeness

• At most one request per second to any given host, with ±200 ms jitter.
• Daily scrape per source (typically 04:00 UTC).
• One originating IP per scheduled run, from lhr (London).

How to opt out

Add either rule to your robots.txt — both are honoured within 24 hours:

User-agent: pterion-bot
Disallow: /

If you would like specific event pages removed or a takedown, email contact@pterion.uk with the URLs — we action removals within two working days.

Contact

contact@pterion.uk for any questions about the crawler. For data-protection enquiries see Privacy.