If you found this from a server log
About our availability bot
If you’re a park or reservation-platform operator and you saw
CampingSorted/1.0 (+https://campingsorted.com/bot) in your
logs, that’s us. This page explains who we are and how our poller
behaves. We aim to be a good guest on your systems. If
anything we do is a problem, please write
[email protected];
we’ll respond and adjust quickly.
A better way to work together
Polling is our fallback, not our preference. We do it only because it’s currently the sole way we have to see the public availability your visitors already see. If you offer an official feed, API, or webhook, or would consider building one, we would much rather use that. It’s lighter on your infrastructure, more accurate for the people we notify, and a real relationship instead of a workaround. We’re small, easy to work with, and happy to build to whatever shape suits you. If there’s a preferred way for partners to access this availability data, we’d love to chat: [email protected].
Who we are
CampingSorted is a small service operated by CampingSorted LLC (Washington, USA). We help people get a campsite by watching the parks they ask about and notifying them when a site frees up. A real human is one email away: [email protected].
What the bot does
It reads publicly available campsite-availability information, the same availability a member of the public sees on a reservation website, so we can tell our users when a spot opens. It is read-only: it never books, holds, cancels, modifies, or transacts anything, and it never logs in or touches any private or account-protected data.
How it behaves
- It identifies itself honestly. Every request carries a single, stable User-Agent that names us and links back to this page. We do not rotate User-Agents, rotate IP addresses, or shape our timing to disguise that the traffic is ours.
- It polls gently. Requests are rate-limited per host and spread out so we never send a burst. We tune our pace to stay light on your infrastructure, not to maximize speed.
- It respects your signals. If you return a
429or403, we treat it as a hard stop: a per-operator circuit breaker backs us off and stops polling that host. We do not retry around a block or try to evade it. A hard block is a signal for us to stop and write to you, not to work around you. If you send aRetry-Afterheader, we honor it for as long as you ask, up to an hour, then resume gently. If you ask us to wait longer than a day, we stop and email you instead. - It runs from one place. Our pollers run on Google Cloud from a fixed region; we use no residential proxies and no IP-rotation infrastructure.
robots.txt & terms
We aim to honor your published access expectations. If you’d prefer we change our cadence, use a specific endpoint, throttle differently, or stop entirely, just tell us and we’ll comply. An email gets a faster, more precise result than a block. We’d genuinely rather cooperate.
Contact
Questions, concerns, takedown or rate requests, or just curiosity: [email protected]. We read every message.