How we keep up with official news
GrandTheftAuto.World runs a small, polite monitor that reads a handful of public, official pages so that this site can tell you about a new weekly event or a release change quickly — and correctly. This page explains exactly what it does.
What it reads, and why
The publisher’s official news feed; its public pages for Grand Theft Auto V, Grand Theft Auto Online and Grand Theft Auto VI, and the media galleries on those pages; its online store’s public list of pages; and the parent company’s list of press releases. Regulatory filings and support articles are never read automatically: a person saves them by hand.
It looks for what changed: a new article, a changed release date or platform, a new weekly event, a picture added to a gallery. That is how the GTA Online weekly page can show a new week soon after it starts, and how a stale fact gets corrected.
How often
For now, never on its own: every run is started by a person, and between runs nothing is read at all.
The schedule it is built to keep, once it is switched on, is no more than this: each page once a day, early in the morning UK time, and some only once a week; and on Thursday afternoons, when GTA Online’s weekly events change, the news feed and the GTA Online page once an hour. This page will say so when the schedule starts.
How it behaves
It says who it is
Every request carries the identifier below, which links back to this page. It never pretends to be a browser or another crawler.
It obeys robots.txt
It reads each site's robots.txt before anything else on every run, and follows the rules written for it, or the general rules where none name it. A page robots.txt keeps it away from is never requested.
It goes slowly
At least ten seconds between two requests to the same site, a small fixed number of requests per site per run, and conditional requests, so a page that has not changed costs the site almost nothing.
It stops when told no
A refusal, a rate limit or a bot check ends that run for the site. The monitor does not retry, wait it out or work around it; a person looks into it, and if the site no longer wants to be read automatically, we stop reading it automatically.
It never signs in
No accounts, no passwords, no keys and no private interfaces. It reads only what anyone can read without signing in.
It does not download media
It notes that a picture or a video is listed on a page — its name, its label and its stated size — and never downloads it. Nothing it finds is published without a person approving it.
It carries no personal data
No reader's information, no account and no one's email address is ever part of a request it makes.
A person reviews every change
The monitor never changes this site. It writes down what it noticed and proposes an update; a person checks the proposal against the official page, accepts it, corrects it or sets it aside, and only then does anything you read here change. If an accepted change turns out to be wrong, it is withdrawn in the open rather than quietly rewritten.
How to recognise it
It identifies itself with exactly this:
GrandTheftAuto.World-monitor/1.0 (+https://grandtheftauto.world/monitor)
Run one of these sites?
If you would like the monitor to read your site less often, differently or not at all, a robots.txt rule naming it is honoured on its next run. You can also reach the operator directly through the contact details on our privacy page.