For website owners

Our calendar reader

October 20, 2026

Social Squares is a free, non-partisan community calendar for Nebraska towns: one calm page per town with the library storytimes, school events, church suppers and home games. To keep those pages current, a small program reads the public event calendars that libraries, schools, churches, chambers and towns publish. This page says exactly what it does.

The short version: it reads public event calendars once a day, slowly, honors robots.txt, never gets past a bot check or a login, and credits every event to you with a link back. To be left out, block it in robots.txt or write to us.

Who it is

User agent: SocialSquares/1.0 (+https://socialsquares.org/bot; community calendar, one read a day)
Signed requests: it signs its requests with Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures, Ed25519). The signature agent is https://socialsquares.org, and the public key is at /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. A request that claims to be us without a valid signature isn't us.

What it reads

Public event calendars only: calendar feeds (iCal), event listings, and the public pages a calendar is shown on.
Never anything behind a login, a paywall or a form. Never personal information: if a listing carries a contact's phone or email, we don't keep it.
Never Facebook or other social media, and never news articles.

How it behaves

Once a day per calendar, in the early morning, with a pause between requests to the same site (longer if your robots.txt asks for a crawl delay).
robots.txt is honored before every site. If your robots.txt turns away AI crawlers by name, we stay away from your whole site too, even though this reader doesn't train or feed any AI model.
Bot checks are respected. If a site answers with a challenge or a block, the reader stops and doesn't try again that day.

What happens to your events

Each event appears on the page for its town with your organization's name and a link back to your own listing. Event details stay as you wrote them. Odd or unusual items are held for a person, the town's keeper, to read before they appear.

To be left out, or let in

Leave us out: add User-agent: SocialSquares and Disallow: / to your robots.txt, or write to us and we'll stop within a day.
Let us in: if your site sits behind a bot check and you'd like your calendar on your town's page, you can allow verified or signed bots, allowlist the user agent above, or simply send us a calendar link (Google Calendar or iCal).

Questions

Write to us. A real person reads every message.