About ParishCheckBot

If you have found ParishCheckBot in your website's visitor logs, this page explains what it is, what it did, and how to stop it.

What it is

ParishCheckBot is an automated accessibility checker for parish and town council websites in England. It reads public pages and documents and tests them against checks drawn from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, levels A and AA. The results go into a report for the council's clerk.

It is run by ParishCheck (parishcheck.co.uk).

What it does on your site

• Starts at the home page and follows links to other pages on the same site, up to 40 pages in one visit.
• Downloads PDFs linked from those pages, up to 60 files, to check whether they have a title, a language, tags and real text.
• Visits one page at a time and waits at least one second before the next. Each page loads as it would in an ordinary browser.
• Reads your robots.txt file first and stays out of anything it excludes. A Crawl-delay setting is respected, up to ten seconds.

What it does not do

• It does not log in, fill in or submit forms, or accept cookies.
• It does not visit pages your robots.txt file excludes.
• It does not see your visitors or anything about them, and it is not looking for information about people. It keeps short extracts of public page code where a check fails, so the problem can be shown in the report.
• It does not change anything on your site.

How to recognise it

Every request carries this label (the user agent). The version number may differ:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ParishCheckBot/0.1.0; +https://parishcheck.co.uk/bot)

How to stop it visiting

Either of these will stop it:

• Email hello@parishcheck.co.uk with your website address and we will remove it from our list.
• Add these two lines to your site's robots.txt file. Your website supplier can do this for you.

User-agent: ParishCheckBot
Disallow: /

Contact

For questions, or if the bot is causing a problem, email hello@parishcheck.co.uk. Please include your website address and, if you can, the date and time of the visit.