The VaporFox Hound

The VaporFox Hound is a "web crawler" used by this web site to maintain the database of sites offering e-cigarette products.

The VaporFox Hound crawls web pages that are related to e-cigarettes in general, specifically web sites that sell e-cigarettes and supplies to consumers. The results of the crawl are then made available to visitors to this web site. The VaporFox Hound is a "friendly bot" that follows the Robots protocols as defined below:

Robots Exclusion

Sometimes people find their site has been indexed by an indexing robot, or that a resource discovery robot has visited part of a site that for some reason shouldn't be visited by robots.

In recognition of this problem, many Web Robots offer facilities for Web site administrators and content providers to limit what the robot does. This is achieved through two mechanisms:

The remainder of this pages provides full details on these facilities.

Note that these methods rely on cooperation from the Robot, and are by no means guaranteed to work for every Robot. If you need stronger protection from robots and other agents, you should use alternative methods such as password protection. The VaporFox Hound does follow the guidelines set by you using these methods.

The Robots Exclusion Protocol

The Robots Exclusion Protocol is a method that allows Web site administrators to indicate to visiting robots which parts of their site should not be visited by the robot.

In a nutshell, when a Robot vists a Web site, say http://www.yourdomain.com/, it firsts checks for http://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If it can find this document, it will analyse its contents for records like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
					

to see if it is allowed to retrieve the document.

The Robots META tag

The Robots META tag allows HTML authors to indicate to visiting robots if a document may be indexed, or used to harvest more links. No server administrator action is required.

In this simple example:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
					

a robot should neither index this document, nor analyse it for links.

You may use either or both of the methods described above to control how the VaporFox Hound indexes your page(s). For more information on controlling how robots crawl your web site, please visit this page.

Specific Rules For VaporFox Hound

To create rules in robots.txt or your META tags specifically for the VaporFox Hound, you can use the user-agent "Vaporfox" in your robots.txt file as follows:

User-agent: VaporFox
Disallow: /
					

You can create a META tag specifically for VaporFox on each page of your web site as well:

<meta name="vaporfox_hound" content="noindex,nofollow">
					

Requesting Site Inclusion

If you know of a web site that should be included in the VaporFox Search Engine, you can enter the URL on this page.

Requesting Site Exclusion

If your web site is included in the VaporFox Search Engine after incorporating the methods detailed above, you may request a manual removal by contacting us.

What the Hound Collects From Your Site

The Hound will download the HTML code from your web site and locate the links to your products. It will then download the HTML code for each of your products pages to determine the price and stock availability. It will not make more than one request every two minutes, and it will not download images from your server unless it discovers a product image.

If the Hound discovers a product image, the image will be downloaded to the VaporFox server, so that no additional bandwidth will be used from your web site.

Our Commitment

The goal of VaporFox is to provide a valuable resource for both consumers and suppliers of e-cigarette and personal vaporizer products. We will work with suppliers to improve our services, both in the inclusion and exclusion of data.