MediLadderBot

If you have found this address in a server log, MediLadderBot is what visited you. This page explains what it is, what it collects, how often it runs, and how to make it stop.

What it is

MediLadder is a free tool that helps UK sixth-form students work out which medical schools their profile fits, so that they choose their four UCAS applications sensibly. It is built and run by a UK doctor.

Every entry requirement the tool shows has to be traceable to the page it came from, on the date it came from it, because a requirement that has quietly changed can cost an applicant a place. MediLadderBot is how that record is kept current. It visits publicly available admissions pages, saves a copy for reference, and notes what changed since the previous visit so that only the changes need reading.

What it collects

• Publicly available pages and PDF documents about medical school entry requirements, admissions policies, contextual and widening participation schemes, and interview arrangements.
• Nothing behind a login, a paywall or a form. It does not submit forms, does not attempt to sign in, and holds no credentials of any kind.
• No personal data. It does not look for staff or student details, and any it encountered incidentally on a public page is not extracted or used.

Saved copies are held privately as a dated reference for checking facts. They are not republished. What appears on the MediLadder site is the factual requirements, restated in our own words, with a link to your page as the source.

How it behaves

• One request at a time. Never in parallel, never more than one connection open to your server.
• At least three seconds between requests, and longer if your robots.txt asks for longer. Where the two differ we use yours.
• robots.txt is honoured strictly, including where it blocks something we would have liked. If it cannot be reached, the site is left alone for that run.
• A capped visit. No more than around one hundred pages per institution per run.
• Roughly once a month. Occasionally an extra run when a cycle's requirements are published.
• It identifies itself on every request:

  MediLadderBot/1.0 (+https://mediladder.co.uk/bot; enquiries@mediladder.co.uk)

How to slow it down or stop it

Either method below works and takes effect on our next run. You do not need to contact us first, though we would rather hear from you.

Ask it to wait longer, in your robots.txt:

User-agent: MediLadderBot
Crawl-delay: 10

Ask it to stay away entirely, in your robots.txt:

User-agent: MediLadderBot
Disallow: /

Or email enquiries@mediladder.co.uk and say so plainly. A request to stop is acted on without argument, and we will confirm when it is done. If you would prefer we take a different route to the same information, for example a data feed or a single page you maintain, we would genuinely welcome that and it is less work for your servers than crawling.

If something has gone wrong

If MediLadderBot has caused load you noticed, requested something it should not have, or is behaving in a way this page does not describe, please email enquiries@mediladder.co.uk with the date, the time and a log line or two. That is a fault on our side and we want to know about it.

Note that anyone can put any text in a user-agent string. If you are seeing behaviour that contradicts this page, it may not be us, and we would still like to hear about it.