Arnb.Org: Web Robot

What Is A Web Robot?

Our proprietary web robot is similar to a search engine’s web crawler, but much more focused. Twice per week on Tuesday and Friday the robot scans the online event schedule of over 180 bands, venues and event promoters; compares the respective schedule’s events to the events in our database; then updates our database, which is the source for our web schedules. The robot posts about 80% of the events on our schedules, the remainder are posted by bands, venues, event promoters, zydeco dancers and fans.

Each scanned web site schedule requires a custom module tailored to the respective site’s HTML that extracts, verifies and formats the date, time, venue, address, links and other information for storage in our database. Some web sites refuse to connect to the robot, and some event schedules have HTML we cannot understand or process.

Does the robot post all events on a web site?

We try, but we only post events with a street address that our readers can locate on a map, or events with a link to a valid website. Events not meeting our posting requirements are saved in a suspense file for manual resolution and posting using our Robot Assist interface. Events are automatically published when:

1. They are public. Weddings and private events are ignored
2. There is a valid performance date equal or greater than today
3. For band schedules there is a venue or festival name and:
   • The city, state/province, and/or country are valid and
   • Venue name exists in our database at the same city, state and/or country address or
   • Venue name is not in our database and has a link with a valid URL, or a street address.
4. For venue schedules the band is in our database.

Which bands are posted by the robot?

How can my events be posted onto your schedules?

Please submit a ticket to our Helpdesk for a site review. Include the URL of the schedule in your message. The site review and custom interface module are provided free of any charges.