How we check
Every Show HN launch with its own website and at least 3 upvotes joins the cohort for the week it launched. We look at it when it arrives, then again at 30, 90 and 365 days.
Obituaries are satire about a public product. They are never about the people who built it.
What alive means
- Reachable
- The domain resolves and the homepage answers.
- Not parked
- The page is not a parking page, a registrar placeholder, a hosting error or an empty shell.
- Changed
- The homepage differs from the last check. A page that never changes is frozen.
- Shipping
- A sitemap, changelog or linked public repository shows activity since the last check.
- Charging
- A pricing page or a checkout link still exists.
- For sale
- The product is listed on a public marketplace. We do not read marketplaces yet.
What the statuses mean
- Alive
- Up, and at least one sign of life beyond answering.
- Coasting
- Up, but frozen. Nothing has changed since an earlier check.
- Critical
- The check failed. We check again three days later.
- Dead
- Gone, parked or failing twice in a row. It gets an obituary.
- For sale
- Listed for sale on a public marketplace.
- Appealed
- The founder says it is alive. A person is looking.
A missing domain, a parking page or a hosting error counts at once. Anything that might be a bad day gets a second look first.
How we crawl
- We read robots.txt first and do what it says.
- We fetch the homepage, the sitemap and at most one changelog page. Never more than six requests.
- We only look at public pages. We never test logins, probe for weaknesses or scan ports.
- Each request waits ten seconds at most, then we give up and try another day.
Our crawler identifies itself as:
DidItSurviveBot/1.0 (+https://diditsurvive.com/about)
To keep it out entirely, add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: DidItSurviveBot Disallow: /
Appeal or opt out
If we called your product dead and it is not, tell us. If you want it off the site, tell us that instead. Either way, email hello@diditsurvive.com with the product's address. A one-click button on each product page is on its way.
We do not notify anyone. We just check back.