About our bot

WiseTribal is a directory of Tribal Nations and Indigenous organisations. It is run by Melvin Haynes, its founder.

To keep what we publish accurate, we use a small automated program, our bot, that reads public websites. This page explains what it does, in plain language.

Our bot is an automated program that visits public web pages. When it visits your website it tells your server who it is, using this name (its "user agent"):

DirectoryPlatformBot/0.1 (+https://wisetribal.com/about-our-bot)

The name includes the address of this page, so you can always find out who is visiting and why.

Only public information that Nations and organizations publish themselves, or that an official public source lists:

• a Nation's contact details: its official name, office address, main phone number and official website

• its departments, programs and services, with links to them

• public events

• job postings and public bid notices

• public leaders, by name and title only, exactly as the Nation publishes them

• business listings: a business's own public name, address, phone number and website, including the Nation's own enterprises

• business contact details and names that a business itself publishes in official public directories (for example the U.S. Department of the Interior's Indian Arts and Crafts Board Source Directory)

• health clinics and other public facilities: name, address and main phone number

• facts from official public records, such as the Federal Register list of federally recognized Tribes, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Tribal Leaders Directory, U.S. Census boundaries and federal program lists

Our bot never collects:

• lists of a Nation's members, or anything about individual members, such as enrollment status or personal details

• anything about a leader beyond the name and title the Nation publishes

• personal contact details that a person has not published for their business

• photos

• logos, seals or other artwork, which it does not copy (the one exception, event flyers, is described below)

• cultural content of any kind (stories, language, ceremony, images or teachings) copied from a website

• anything behind a login or a paywall

The one exception: a Nation's own event flyers. We use a Nation's event flyers only with that Nation's permission, credited to the Nation and linked to its event page, and we stop showing them whenever the Nation asks.

Our bot is a polite visitor:

• It reads your site's robots.txt first and obeys it.

• It asks any one website for no more than one request every 5 seconds (slower if your robots.txt asks for a longer delay).

• It says who it is, every time, with the name shown above.

• It does not try to get past CAPTCHAs, log-ins or paywalls.

• It does not disguise itself as a web browser or a person.

• It does not rotate through different network addresses to avoid being blocked.

• If your site tells it to slow down or to stay away, it does. If your robots.txt cannot be read because the server answers "access denied" or "too many requests", it stays away.

To stop our bot visiting your website, add these two lines to your site's robots.txt file:

User-agent: DirectoryPlatformBot
Disallow: /

Or contact us (see below) and we will stop it for you. Either way we honour your request, and your Nation goes on our do-not-collect list, so it is never collected again.

If something we show about you is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it. Please say which page and what should change.

You can also use our Report a correction page.

You can also write to us using the contact details below.

Email: info@wisetribal.com

Write to us with questions, corrections or to opt out. Please tell us which website you mean.

Information about a Nation belongs to that Nation. Any Nation can ask us to correct it or to remove it, or ask us to stop collecting it, at any time. We respect the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance: Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility and Ethics.