Read the site boundary before you fetch
Check robots.txt, access cues, and ethical constraints before starting a scrape.
The move: treat permission and impact as first-class inputs. A basic scraper can fetch public HTML quickly. That does not mean the team should fetch everything it can reach. A good boundary check asks three questions before volume starts: what has the site owner signaled, what could harm the service or users, and what data should not enter your pipeline? Robots.txt is a signal you should parse deliberately The Robots Exclusion Protocol uses user-agent groups and allow/disallow rules. Your crawler should identify itself and apply the most specific relevant rule. If a path is disallowed for your user-agent, do not…
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