Collection policy · effective July 2026
How we collect
If you operate a legislative website and found this page in a User-Agent string or server log: this is who we are, exactly what our traffic looks like, and how to reach a person who can change it.
| Operator | Statehouse (statehousedata.com) |
|---|---|
| User-Agent | StatehouseBot/1.0 (+https://statehousedata.com/how-we-collect; contact@statehousedata.com) |
| Egress address | 209.71.92.59 — all collection traffic, no exceptions |
| Bulk transfers | 1 request every 2 seconds, single connection; overnight, 8 p.m.–6 a.m. site-local time |
| Web requests | 1 request every 4 seconds |
| robots.txt | honored everywhere, without exception |
| Contact | contact@statehousedata.com — monitored |
§1Who we are
Statehouse is a data service that archives and republishes state legislative information — bills, votes, committee activity, and calendars — with full fidelity to the official record. Our users are researchers, developers, and AI systems that need accurate, traceable legislative data.
§2What we collect
Public legislative records only: bill texts and their versions, journals, vote records, committee schedules and minutes, witness lists, floor calendars, and the policy pages that govern access to them. We collect nothing about individuals who use legislative websites, and we set no cookies and run no scripts on anyone's site — our collection is plain document retrieval.
§3How we collect it
Bulk material comes from the channels states publish for exactly this purpose — for Texas, the Legislative Council's public FTP server rather than the website. Where a document class exists only on the web, we retrieve those pages individually, at the rates in the identification record above, triggered by the state's own change signals (RSS feeds and alert subscriptions) rather than by scheduled crawling.
We fetch each document once and keep a byte-exact archive, so we never re-download what we already hold. Requests use conditional headers (If-Modified-Since / ETag) where the server supports them, and unchanged documents cost a header exchange, not a transfer.
§4What we honor
robots.txt is honored on every host, with no engineered exceptions. Published acceptable-use policies are followed as written — where a state directs bulk consumers to a specific channel, that channel is the only one we use. Announced maintenance windows are scheduled around. Every request we send is attributable: the User-Agent above on the web, and the fixed egress address everywhere.
§5Reaching us
Write to contact@statehousedata.com and a person will answer. If our traffic is ever unwelcome, tell us what to change — rate, hours, channel, or scope — and we will comply promptly. We would rather ask than assume, and we would rather slow down than be blocked.
This page is versioned with our source code; the effective date above changes whenever the policy does.