HackyChat Bot

A respectful web crawler that helps build conversations around news stories

What is HackyChat?

HackyChat is a social platform that creates chat rooms around news articles and web content. When users share a link, we fetch metadata (title, description, and image) to create a rich preview and help group similar stories together.

We Drive Traffic to Publishers

HackyChat is designed to benefit publishers. Every chat room links back to the original article, encouraging users to read the full story on your site. We're building a community of engaged readers who want to discuss your content.

What Data We Collect

Our bot only fetches publicly available metadata from your pages:

Title - From og:title or <title> tag
Description - From og:description or meta description
Image - From og:image for article previews
Site Name - From og:site_name for attribution

We do not scrape article content, bypass paywalls, or store your full pages.

Bot Identification

Our bot identifies itself with the following User-Agent:

HackyChatBot/1.0 (+https://hackychat.com/bot-info)

Request Behavior

Rate limiting: We make at most 1 request per URL, cached indefinitely
Timeout: We wait up to 10 seconds before giving up
Robots.txt: We respect robots.txt directives when present
No scraping: We only fetch metadata, not full article content

Questions or Concerns?

If you have any questions about our bot, want to adjust how we access your site, or would like to partner with us, please reach out:

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