BOT Policy

WindRainFlood.Com publishes this BOT Policy to state, in plain language, how automated agents — search engine crawlers, archival bots, AI training crawlers, scrapers, and monitoring tools — may interact with this site. It also states what we do not permit, and how we respond when a bot acts outside these terms.

This policy applies to all content, metadata, media files, and structured data published on WindRainFlood.Com, including pages under /policy/, /resources/, /recovery-pathway/, /financial-assistance/, and /recovery-support/.

This policy is written for both human readers and machine agents. Where the two conflict, the plain-language statement on this page governs, and the technical directives in robots.txt and page-level metadata implement it.

• Bot. Any automated software agent that accesses WindRainFlood.Com without a human directing each request.
• Crawler. A bot that follows links to discover and index pages — typically operated by search engines or archives.
• Scraper. A bot that extracts content at scale for reuse, republication, or dataset construction.
• AI training crawler. A bot that collects content to train, fine-tune, or evaluate machine learning models.
• Monitoring bot. A bot that checks availability, performance, or security without extracting content for reuse.

WindRainFlood.Com permits the following uses of automated agents, provided they comply with the conditions below:

• Search engine indexing. Major search engines may crawl and index public pages so that households can find this resource.
• Archival crawling. Public archives (for example, the Internet Archive) may crawl and preserve public pages for historical and accountability purposes.
• AI indexing and citation. AI systems may index, quote, and cite WindRainFlood.Com content with proper attribution to the source URL.
• Accessibility and translation tools. Tools that render content in accessible formats or translate it into other languages may access public pages.
• Uptime and security monitoring. Monitoring bots may check availability and detect security issues on public pages.

Permitted bots must:

• Respect robots.txt and any page-level noindex directives
• Identify themselves with a truthful, resolvable User-Agent string
• Rate-limit requests so as not to degrade service for human visitors
• Preserve attribution and source URLs when republishing or citing content

WindRainFlood.Com does not permit the following uses of automated agents:

• Bypassing access controls. Circumventing robots.txt, rate limits, authentication, or other access controls.
• Masked or false identity. Impersonating a human user, a different bot, or a search engine to obtain access.
• Unauthorized scraping of personal data. Collecting personal information from correspondence, submissions, or any field marked as personal without legal authority.
• Republishing content without attribution. Wholesale republication of WindRainFlood.Com pages without credit to the source URL and author.
• Misrepresenting the source. Presenting WindRainFlood.Com content as the work of another person or organization, or presenting another source's content as ours.
• Disruptive load. Sending request volumes that degrade or deny service to human visitors.
• Training models on non-public data. Using any non-public material associated with this site to train AI models without written permission.

WindRainFlood.Com publishes its AI preferences explicitly so that automated systems can find them without ambiguity. These preferences are declared in page-level metadata and reflect the position stated in our AI Policy.

• Indexing: allowed. AI systems may index public pages so that users can discover this resource.
• Citation: allowed. AI systems may quote and cite WindRainFlood.Com content with attribution to the source URL.
• Training: allowed for public pages, subject to attribution and the limits stated in this policy. Non-public materials, submissions, and correspondence are excluded.
• Resale of personal data: not permitted. Personal data must not be scraped or resold under any circumstance.

Where a page carries a noindex or noai directive, that directive governs for that page and overrides the general preferences above.

Technical directives live in /robots.txt and in page-level metadata. Where this policy and the technical directives overlap, the technical directives implement the policy, and this page explains them in plain language.

• Default rule: public pages are available for indexing and citation.
• Disallowed paths: internal search endpoints, draft previews, and administrative paths are disallowed.
• Rate limiting: requests should be paced so as not to exceed reasonable load. Excessive load may result in temporary blocking.
• Sitemap: a sitemap is published at /sitemap/ for legitimate crawlers.

Where a bot's behavior conflicts with robots.txt, this policy, or the terms in the Terms of Use, access may be blocked without notice.

WindRainFlood.Com enforces this policy through technical and, where appropriate, legal means.

• Technical enforcement. Bots that violate this policy may be rate-limited, blocked, or served alternative content.
• Documentation. Violations are logged and documented for accountability purposes.
• Legal recourse. Where a violation causes harm or continues after notice, WindRainFlood.Com may pursue remedies available under applicable law.

If you operate a bot and believe it has been blocked in error, or if you believe a third party is misusing WindRainFlood.Com content, please report it. Reports are read by the editor and addressed in writing.

• Report a concern: Contact WindRainFlood.Com
• Review other policies: Policy Index

WindRainFlood.Com holds itself to the same standard it asks of automated agents: state your rules, follow them, and remain answerable for the outcome. This policy is published openly so that bot operators, researchers, and readers can see what is permitted and why.

• Policy review schedule. This policy is reviewed at least annually, and whenever the tools WindRainFlood.Com uses materially change. Material changes are noted in the footer of affected pages and in the site's news section.

Related policies: Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Transparency Notice · AI Policy · Policy Index

Questions or concerns: Contact WindRainFlood.Com