Made for humans by humans

I was recently monitoring my server logs and I noticed multiple requests to a unusual path. /humans.txt. The request returned a 404 since it didn't exist but it got my attention. A few seconds of googling revealed a very interesting idea: a website can talk to bots with the robots.txt file and talk to humans with humans.txt.

The site is self explanatory:

The only aim of this initiative is to know who the authors of the sites we visit are.

And also :

Because it's something simple and fast to create. Because it's not intrusive with the code. More often than not, the owners of the site don't like the authors signing it; they claim that doing so may make the site less efficient. By adding a txt file, you can prove your authorship (not your property) in an external, fast, easy and accessible way.

I decided to add it to my sites even though I am mostly doing everything on my own, plus it is not intrusive. One thing though, I may slip some html into it because .txt is not the most human friendly format.

Here are a few companies that uses it:

Google
Medium
Neocities
iDiallo

---