Information on the Plait bot
Plait is a command line jukebox and music player front-end. From the programmer's perspective, it is a script written in Awk and UNIX shell which acts as a front end to the find, grep, and wget commands. Users use it to generate playlists containing audio files and streams and then submit the playlists to a music player.
The Plait bot (a part of Plait) is an HTML screen scraper which finds audio streams by accessing the Shoutcast directory. In order to respect the Shoutcast terms of service, it observes the following rule: no content downloaded from the directory is stored permanently or collected in any way.
The Plait bot does not perform mass downloads. When a user runs a Plait command which uses the Plait bot, the process that unfolds is similar to what would happen if the same user performed a search manually using the Shoutcast directory.
The Plait bot obeys the robots.txt exclusion protocol. To prevent
the Plait bot from scraping your site, you could use the following in
robots.txt:
User-agent: Plait
Disallow: /
For more information, including author contact information, see The Plait Home Page.