About VenueRadarBot
VenueRadarBot is the automated tool behind Venue Radar. If you've seen it in your website's logs, this page explains what it does and how to reach us.
What Venue Radar does
Venue Radar tells local suppliers, such as drinks wholesalers, till and card payment providers and bar equipment firms, about new and changing licensed premises. It uses the premises licence application notices that councils publish under the Licensing Act 2003.
What the bot collects
- Public notices of premises licence applications, variations and reviews.
- The premises details in each notice: name, address, type of application, activities, hours and dates.
- The address of the page each notice came from, and the date we collected it, so every record can be checked.
What it doesn't collect
- We don't keep the names of individual applicants, premises supervisors or anyone making a representation. They're removed before anything is saved.
- We don't collect personal email addresses or phone numbers.
- We don't log in, fill in forms or make applications.
How it behaves
- It follows your robots.txt file. If robots.txt asks bots not to visit a page, we don't.
- It makes no more than one request every three seconds to any website, and visits each council about once a day.
- If a site blocks it, shows a security check or says it's busy, it stops straight away and doesn't try to get round it.
- It always identifies itself as:
VenueRadarBot/0.1 (+https://newvenueradar.co.uk/bot; data@newvenueradar.co.uk)
Contact us, or ask us to slow down or stop
Email data@newvenueradar.co.uk. If you'd like the bot to visit less often, stop visiting, or collect from a different page, tell us and we'll do it promptly. You can also block VenueRadarBot in your robots.txt file, and it will respect that.
If your council would rather send us a weekly list of new applications than have a bot visit, we'd be very happy to receive it at the same address.