About Face Out's shop checker

Face Out is a free tool that helps authors find independent bookshops. To keep its shop list current, it runs a small automatic checker that identifies itself as FaceOutBooks.

What it does:

• Once a week it downloads the public list of bookshops from OpenStreetMap for the areas Face Out covers.
• Once a month it reads the newest free release of Overture Maps places (an open dataset that contains no OpenStreetMap data) for the same areas, to see which shops both sources list and to add bookshops the map was missing. This is a download of published files, not a visit to any shop.
• About once a month per shop, it checks that the shop's website is online. It first reads the site's robots.txt. If the site asks bots not to visit, it doesn't. Otherwise it loads the home page once and records whether the site answered. On that same page it looks for the address and phone number from the shop's listing, so it can show when the shop's own website agrees with the map. It goes slowly, one shop at a time.

It doesn't keep or republish shop pages, and it doesn't fill in forms. The only things it records are whether the site answered and whether the address and phone matched. If Face Out later starts looking for words like "consignment" or "local authors" on shop websites, this page will be updated before that starts.

Face Out never emails or contacts shops.