About the Hallway bot

Last updated: 25 August 2026

Who this is

hallway-events-bot is the automated crawler behind Hallway's conference directory. It reads publicly published conference and CFP pages so organisers and speakers can find each other without either side having to manually list anything. Every request it makes identifies itself with this user-agent string:

hallway-events-bot (+https://hallway.events/about/bot)

If a request against your site did not carry that user-agent, it was not made by this bot.

Why it visits your site

Hallway builds a public directory of conferences and their calls for papers (CFPs), free to browse and free to be listed in. The bot visits a conference's own website (and pages it links to, such as a CFP platform or a sponsor page) to read what the page already states in public - name, dates, location, CFP window, and the handful of speaker-support and trust signals the directory surfaces. Nothing it reads is published without a human moderator reviewing it first.

How it respects your site

The bot follows the same "respect the web" rules on every request it makes, regardless of who is asking it to fetch a page:

robots.txt is honoured. Before fetching anything from a host, the bot fetches and parses that host's robots.txt and checks it against its own user-agent token, hallway-events-bot. If your robots.txt has no group naming that token specifically, the bot falls back to the wildcard (User-agent: *) group, exactly as any well-behaved crawler would. A path disallowed for the matching group is never fetched - the bot does not make the request and try again, it simply does not go there.
It paces itself per host. The bot waits a minimum interval between requests to the same host rather than fetching as fast as it can - polite pacing, not a burst of traffic.
Its crawls are bounded. When the bot archives more than a single page from your site (for example, following links within a conference's own section of a shared site), it stays scoped to that URL topology - it does not wander your whole domain - and stops at a fixed page-count cap. A site that would exceed the cap is flagged for a human to scope manually rather than being partially crawled past it.
A missing or erroneous robots.txt never blocks a good-faith fetch. If your site has no robots.txt, or it fails to load, the bot treats that as "no stated rules" and proceeds - the same posture any standards-following crawler takes - but a robots.txt that DOES load and disallows a path is always honoured.

Takedown and opt-out

Every listing in the directory carries a "report/claim this listing" control that routes straight to Hallway's moderation queue at top priority. A source or an individual listing can be opted out permanently on request, and that opt-out is honoured without argument - no justification required. Use the contact route below to ask for a listing to be removed, corrected, or a source excluded from future crawls entirely.

Requesting or granting an allowlist exception

This page changes nothing about how the bot behaves by itself - it is a statement of what the bot already does, not a control panel. If your robots.txt currently disallows hallway-events-bot (or the wildcard group it falls back to) and you would like to grant it access, you don't need anything from Hallway to do that: add or edit the relevant User-agent: hallway-events-bot group in your own robots.txt the same way you would for any other crawler. The bot re-checks robots.txt on every run, so a change takes effect the next time it visits.

If you would prefer to ask a question first, or want a listing sourced from your site corrected or removed, contact us at the address above.