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Our crawler

VaraPerformanceBot

Vara Performance lists where and when people play pickleball. VaraPerformanceBot is the small crawler that reads public pickleball schedules (open play, clinics, socials, tournaments) so players can find them in one place.

How to recognise it

Every request it makes carries this User-Agent:

VaraPerformanceBot/1.0 (+https://varaperformance.com/bot)

The robots.txt product token is VaraPerformanceBot.

What it reads

  • Public calendar feeds (iCalendar .ics / webcal links), pages with schema.org Event markup (JSON-LD or microdata), and RSS/Atom feeds that carry event dates. For a few authoritative tournament lists with no feed (USA Pickleball's sanctioned tournaments, APA Pickleball's tour at apatournaments.com and the PPA Tour's schedule at ppatour.com), a reader written for that site's listing pages, and then each upcoming tournament's own page on that site for its facts: where to register, entry fees, skill range, formats, schedule and divisions.
  • Only calendars our staff have approved, usually found on a venue's own website. It does not log in, submit forms, run scripts, or follow links across the web.
  • Only the facts: title, date and time, place, price, skill level and a link back to you. It does not copy your write-ups or images.

How it behaves

  • It reads and obeys robots.txt (RFC 9309), including Crawl-delay, before every site and every redirect.
  • If your site answers it with a bot check (a captcha or “checking your browser” page), it stops there: it never tries to get past one, and it sends your site nothing more that day. Allow VaraPerformanceBot if you'd like your listings on Vara Performance.
  • About once a day per calendar, at most one request per second to your server, and it sends If-None-Match / If-Modified-Since so an unchanged calendar costs you a 304. A list spread over several pages is read at least five seconds apart per page.
  • A person on our staff reviews what it finds before anything is published. Listings show who published them and link back: “From your organization, unverified · source”. Tournaments from USA Pickleball, APA Pickleball and the PPA Tour are kept in step with their lists daily and shown as “Listed by <organization>” with a link to the tournament's page; one that leaves a list before it starts goes to our staff, never off the site on its own. A tournament on several lists is shown once, with every list that carries it.
  • If a venue or organizer manages their own listings with us as a partner, the bot leaves them alone.

Opting out

To stop the bot reading your site, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: VaraPerformanceBot
Disallow: /

Or email hello@varaperformance.com with the site or listing. We remove it and add it to a suppression list so it is never imported again.

Run the courts or the club?

Become a partner to post your own schedule, closures and events directly. Partner listings are marked as official and the bot never overwrites them.