🤖 Overview

r6_votereader is a web crawler operated by R6 Digital Solutions, a UK-based data aggregation firm, designed to collect publicly available vote counts and poll results from online contests, surveys, and voting platforms. The bot feeds collected data into the company's VoteInsight analytics product, which provides real-time monitoring and reporting for clients seeking to track public sentiment trends. First documented in official R6 documentation in 2021, the bot is a specialized tool for non-intrusive data gathering in the civic and social polling sector.

🌐 Technical Behavior

r6_votereader issues HTTP GET requests with a default crawl interval of 10 seconds per domain, but may increase frequency to 2 seconds on sites with high update rates such as live vote counters. The bot uses IPv4 addresses primarily from the R6-owned ASN block AS201513 (range 185.220.100.0/24), as published in R6's technical documentation. It only crawls pages containing structured vote data, identified by common patterns like “votes”, “poll”, “result” in URL paths, and does not submit forms or interact with JavaScript-heavy interfaces. The bot operates over HTTPS only and includes a Referer header pointing to the R6 site for transparency.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to R6's official user-agent policy published at their documentation page, the r6_votereader bot fully respects robots.txt directives, including Disallow rules and crawl-delay instructions. The bot's source code (available in a public GitHub repository at github.com/r6digital/votereader-crawler) implements the Robots Exclusion Protocol as a core compliance check before each request. There are no documented cases of the bot ignoring robots.txt rules.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; r6_votereader/2.1; +https://www.r6digital.com/votereader). Secondary variants may include version numbers or platform tags. Behavioral fingerprints include a fixed crawl interval of at least 2 seconds, a custom HTTP header X-R6-Bot: true, and a consistent pattern of visiting only pages with numeric vote counts. No other known User-Agent strings are used.

📊 Data Usage

Collected vote data is used to generate aggregated trend reports for the VoteInsight dashboard, which is licensed to media organizations, political campaigns, and market research firms. The data is not used for AI model training or search indexing; it is solely for near-real-time public sentiment analytics. R6 Digital Solutions explicitly states that no personal data is collected, only aggregate vote tallies.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because r6_votereader can send requests as frequently as every 2 seconds on high-activity pages, operators are advised to apply rate-limiting thresholds (e.g., 30 requests per minute per IP) to prevent resource exhaustion while still allowing legitimate data collection for its intended analytics purpose.

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