4WDGrid

4WDGRID ALERTS BOT

Information for website operators and government publishers

4WDGrid operates an automated crawler that collects publicly available Australian park, track and relevant access alerts — closures, fire bans, planned burns, road and track conditions — so that travellers can see official safety information before they leave. This page explains what it does and how to contact us.

We are not a government agency

4WDGrid is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any government agency, park authority or road authority. 4WDGrid is an independent Australian platform.

The official source is always authoritative. Where information displayed by 4WDGrid differs from the issuing agency's, the agency is correct. Every alert we display links back to its government source, and we tell members to check that source before they travel.

How to identify our traffic

Every request sends this User-Agent:

4WDGridAlertsBot/1.0 (+https://4wdgrid.com/about/alerts-bot; alerts@4wdgrid.com)

How it behaves

  • Polling frequency: each source is normally checked every 30 to 60 minutes. We do not poll faster than the information changes.
  • Conditional requests: we send If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since and honour 304 Not Modified wherever a server supports them, reducing unnecessary data transfer and server requests.
  • Read-only: the crawler issues plain GET requests for pages and feeds that are already public. It does not submit forms, sign in, or use any API that requires a key.
  • It does not evade anything: it will not bypass authentication, work around a CAPTCHA, ignore a block, or attempt to defeat rate limiting. If we are blocked, we stop.
  • Bounded: requests carry strict timeouts and response-size limits, and one source is fetched at a time.

What we do not collect

We collect no personal information from government websites. The crawler reads published alert content only — titles, descriptions, locations, dates and categories. It stores no cookies, sends no credentials, and does not attempt to identify any individual.

Corrections, slower polling, or removal

If you publish one of these sources and want a correction, a lower polling frequency, or your content removed from 4WDGrid entirely, email us and we will act on it. We would rather hear from you than be blocked.

Contact: alerts@4wdgrid.com