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MincastBot

Mincast is a service for creating personalised AI news digests. This page describes the MincastBot crawler, which may fetch publicly available RSS or Atom feeds and, if the source’s policy allows, also publicly available article pages.

What the crawler does

MincastBot fetches supported public RSS or Atom feeds. If the policy of a given source allows it, Mincast may also temporarily fetch publicly available HTML article content for automated analysis and summary generation.

Article source text is not shown to users as a copy of the original article, and Mincast does not create a public archive from it. It is used only as a temporary working input for processing.

The result is Mincast’s own paraphrased summary. For processed articles, Mincast states the original source and a link to the publisher’s original URL.

User-Agent

MincastBot requests identify themselves as:

MincastBot/1.0 (+https://mincast.ai/bot)

Respecting source rules

Before processing a source, Mincast uses an internal publisher policy, which may independently restrict or prohibit the use of RSS, automated content processing, or fetching of article HTML.

When fetching articles, Mincast considers, depending on the source type, in particular:

  • known licence and contractual restrictions of the source,
  • machine-readable TDM reservation signals,
  • robots.txt rules applicable to MincastBot,
  • access restrictions, login and paywalls,
  • any individual licence or agreement with the publisher.

If the applicable policy does not allow fetching or processing, Mincast does not perform that operation.

What Mincast does not do

  • It does not bypass paywalls, logins or other technical access restrictions.
  • It does not show users a full copy of the publisher’s original article.
  • It does not take publishers’ photographs or other image content into digests unless it has corresponding permission.
  • It does not create a lasting public archive from fetched HTML articles.
  • A missing robots.txt, TDM reservation or other machine-readable signal is not treated as a legal guarantee that the content may be used freely.

Audio and TTS

MincastBot does not download the publisher’s audio or video in order to create spoken versions of digests. Mincast audio is produced with a synthetic voice from AI text created by Mincast.

Temporary processing of source text

Article source text is used as a temporary working input. During ordinary processing of new articles it is used for new digests for at most 24 hours and is automatically deleted typically within 30 hours of retrieval.

If a user later asks for a more detailed summary of an older article and the needed AI output is not stored, the article may be fetched again temporarily after a new compliance check. Newly obtained source text is retained only for the time needed to process it.

Publishers, blocking and licences

A publisher or rights holder may contact Mincast at any time about how their source is used, request restriction or cessation of further processing, or discuss an individual licence.

Block requests can be applied technically to both the system catalogue and user-added RSS sources.

Contact: support@mincast.ai

Please include the relevant domain and a contact for reply.

Are you a publisher?

Find more information on the For media and publishers page →