uwloo’s link finder

Course pages on uwloo list resources for each course: notes, slides, course websites, lecture videos and past exams. Besides PDFs shared with uwloo directly, a weekly job looks for them around the web:

• links posted on r/uwaterloo next to a course code;
• students’ sites in the Waterloo CS, SE and ECE webrings, and students’ lists of course links;
• professors’ sites, found through department directories, and their teaching pages;
• course websites like student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs341/;
• GitHub repositories of course notes.

A page is listed only if it loads and names the course, in its title, heading, text or address. Assignments and solutions are never listed unless they’re on the course’s own website. When a link has died, the listing points to the Wayback Machine’s copy instead, or drops it.

For site owners

The finder identifies itself as uwloo-links/1.0 (+https://uwloo.ca/about/links/), follows robots.txt, and fetches one page at a time from each site with a pause in between. Most pages are fetched once every few weeks. To keep it off your site:

User-agent: uwloo-links
Disallow: /

To have a link taken down, use the “Remove” link next to it, or open an issue. Removed links and sites are listed in data/links/removed.txt and never come back.