Bucketdish is an app where people log and rate the dishes they eat. So that someone looking at a restaurant can see what it serves before anyone has logged a meal there, we read the menu the restaurant publishes on its own website. We show it in the app with a link back to that website, the date we last checked it, and a note that it may be out of date.
How to recognise it
Every request we make carries this User-Agent:
BucketdishMenuBot/0.1 (+https://bucketdish.com/bot)
What it fetches
- A restaurant’s home page, the page its
websiteorwebsite:menuentry in OpenStreetMap points to. - That site’s menu pages, and the menu PDFs those pages link to.
- When a page redirects, every step is treated as a new request: we read that site’s robots.txt first, and we never follow a redirect to a delivery platform, to a site that has opted out, or to a private network address.
- Public pages only. We never log in, and we never fill in a form, accept a cookie wall or place an order.
- We never use delivery or booking platforms such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Just Eat or OpenTable, even when a restaurant links to them.
- No images. A menu that exists only as a photo is skipped.
What we keep
- The names of dishes and drinks, their menu section, and their price and description as the menu prints them.
- An item appears in Bucketdish only if it appears word for word on your site. We never invent or reword dishes.
- The page text itself is kept only until the next successful check, for auditing. We do not show it to anyone.
- We do not collect phone numbers, email addresses, staff names or any other personal data.
How often, and how gently
- We check each menu about once a month and send a conditional request, so an unchanged page costs almost nothing.
- We send at most one request to a website every two seconds, and at most ten requests per restaurant per check, counting robots.txt, retries and redirects.
robots.txt
We follow RFC 9309. We obey a group for BucketdishMenuBot (and, for sites that set one up before our rename, ForkhopMenuBot), or for * if there is none. If your robots.txt is unreachable, returns a server error or asks us to slow down (429), we fetch nothing. To keep us out of your whole site, add:
User-agent: BucketdishMenuBot Disallow: /
Removing your menu
If you run a restaurant and want its menu taken out of Bucketdish, email hello@bucketdish.com with the website address. We add your domain to a list we never fetch again, and within 7 days we delete the menu items nobody has logged and remove your descriptions and prices from the rest. Dishes that diners have already logged stay, as their own posts.