RS / Signal
ABOUTSignal is a public news brief. It reads 62 hand-picked publisher feeds, groups the same story told by different outlets into one record, and files 12 records three times a day. It has no feed, no recommendations, no engagement metrics, and no advertising.
The crawler
Every request Signal makes carries this User-Agent, which is how you identify it in a log:
SignalBot/1.0 (+https://signal.sharmaritik.com/about)
- Requests
- One per feed per run, 96 runs a day
- Conditional
- If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since, whenever you gave us one
- Response cap
- 8 MB, then the connection is dropped
- Robots
- Only feeds you publish; no crawling of article pages
Conditional requests are the point rather than an optimisation. Each validator is sent back only if your feed supplied it, so a first fetch and a feed that returns neither header are full requests; every fetch after that carries whatever you gave us. A feed that has not changed then answers 304 with no body, so the overwhelming majority of those runs cost you a header exchange and nothing else.
What is stored
- Kept
- Headline, lede, link, publication time, publisher name
- Kept
- A vector computed from headline and lede, for grouping
- Deleted
- Article body text, after 72 hours
- Never stored
- Images, video, full article text beyond that window
Body text is a processing artefact. It is never rendered to a reader, never rendered to the operator, and is deleted on a schedule rather than on request. What a reader sees is a headline and a link to you.
What is published
- Records
- 12 per filing, never more
- Filings
- 06:00, 12:00, 19:00 Australia/Brisbane
- Every record
- Lists every publisher behind it, each linked
- No
- Reader mode, republished prose, or content behind our chrome
Signal ships with no generative model, so nothing on it is machine-written. Where a record has more than one source, the additional sources are evidence that the story was corroborated, not material to reproduce.
Removal and contact
To have a feed removed from the registry, or to ask anything about the traffic, use the contact page. Removal is a registry edit and takes effect on the next run — there is nothing to negotiate and no form to fill in.