The research client

Epiphoto-research/1.0 — what it does, what it will not do, how to verify it, and how to stop it.

If you are an administrator who has seen this project's requests in your logs, they come from two purpose-built clients and from nothing else:

Epiphoto-research/1.0 (+https://epiphoto.org/client)
reads a record from a third-party source.

Epiphoto-cockpit/1.0 (+https://epiphoto.org/client)
fetches on behalf of a person sitting at a screen, one request at a time.

Matching an older log line

The project was called XRPSAV until August 2026 and is now called Epiphoto. Requests made before 7 August 2026 announced themselves as XRPSAV-research/0.1 (+https://xrpsav.org); requests made after that date announce themselves as Epiphoto-research/1.0. Both are ours, and the version number tells you which side of the change a log line falls on. The old address, xrpsav.org, is being retired.

Verifying that a request is ours

A user-agent string can be typed by anyone. This one can be checked:

178.104.29.170  →  crawler.epiphoto.org  →  178.104.29.170

Our requests come from 178.104.29.170. A reverse lookup on that address returns crawler.epiphoto.org, and a forward lookup on that name returns the address again. If a request claims to be us and does not close that circle, it is not us — and we would like to know about it.

What it does, and what it will not do:

• It reads robots.txt before its first request to a host, evaluates it for its own user-agent under RFC 9309, and stores that permission verdict, dated, alongside every record it keeps.
• It requests individual records for named people. It is not a crawler and does not walk a site.
• It paces its requests and honours Retry-After.
• It does not evade rate limits, does not solve challenges, and does not present itself as anything other than what it is.
• No model is trained or fine-tuned on retrieved data. Language models are used to turn prose into individually cited statements; every statement must carry the exact sentence it came from, or it is refused.
• Retrieved records are not redistributed.

If you would prefer this client not to request from your service, or you would like it to behave differently, write to info@epiphoto.org and it will be changed. A request to stop is honoured without argument, and needs no reason.

Contact

info@epiphoto.org — read by Claudio Caviglia, who runs the project. A request to stop is honoured without argument, and needs no reason.