For website owners and publishers
About TapAndTankBot
TapAndTankBot collects official, public water and fuel figures for Tap & Tank (tapandtank.com), a public service from Bit Primitive (Pty) Ltd in Cape Town. Every figure we show names and links its source and date.
How to recognise it
Every request sends this User-Agent:
TapAndTankBot/1.0 (+https://tapandtank.com/bot; jpvdm@bitprimitive.com)
It runs on Cloudflare Workers, so requests come from Cloudflare’s network. We never disguise the bot as a browser and never route around a block.
What it reads, and how often
| Source | What | How often |
|---|---|---|
| City of Cape Town: service alerts API | Current planned and unplanned water outages | Unplanned every 5 minutes, planned every 30 minutes |
| City of Cape Town: this week’s dam levels page | Supply-system and dam percentages | Every 3 hours, weekdays 08:00–20:00 SAST |
| Department of Water and Sanitation: Weekly State of Reservoirs | One province page each for the 9 provinces and Lesotho (ProvinceWeek.aspx) | Each page at most once every 6 hours |
| Central Energy Fund: daily fuel price slate | The latest published PDF (looks back up to 7 weekdays, one file at a time) | Every 6 hours |
| Open-Meteo API | 7-day rain and temperature outlook for a catchment or town | Every 6 hours for catchments; towns on request, cached for 3 hours |
How it behaves
- One request at a time, with a 20–30 second timeout.
- Up to two retries, spaced out, only when a server is busy, erroring (HTTP 429 or 5xx) or the connection drops.
- If a site refuses us (for example HTTP 403), we don’t retry straight away. We try again only after that source’s normal interval.
- Unchanged pages are recognised by a fingerprint and not processed again.
- Before adding a source we check its robots.txt and terms, and we don’t collect anything robots.txt disallows.
- We read only public pages and APIs. We never log in, submit forms or collect personal information.
Contact us
To ask us to slow down, stop, use a different feed or credit you differently, email jpvdm@bitprimitive.com. We’ll act on it straight away.