FackleBot is the web crawler operated by the fackle.com platform. This page describes its identity and behavior for site operators.

Identity

User-Agent: FackleBot/1.0 (+https://fackle.com/bot)
Operator: Aaron Thomas, operator of fackle.com
Source IP: 51.81.78.30 (reverse DNS crawler.fackle.com)
Authentication: Requests are signed with Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures, Ed25519). Key directory: https://fackle.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory

Purpose

FackleBot is a metadata indexer. From each crawled page it collects homepage-level metadata only: page title, meta description, Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image), page language, and favicon URL, with title and description stored as short snippets. It performs deeper multi-page indexing only for domains verified as owned by their operator. It does not collect page body content, personal data, or media beyond the favicon reference.

Crawl behavior

Honors robots.txt.
Low volume: at most 1–2 concurrent connections, roughly one request per two seconds, and typically one homepage request per external site per week.
Broad but shallow: homepage-only for most domains; deep crawl restricted to domains whose ownership has been verified.

Contact

Questions or requests regarding FackleBot's activity: admin@fackle.com.