• From: Oxford, UK
  • Registered: 2006-05-11
  • Posts: 133

Topic: too many guests - damn robots

i always have my guest counter at around 40 to 100 guests in last 15 mins...I know these are mostly robots as I use statcounter which uses javascript to measure visits and the figure should be around 10 to 20 guests.

Is there a way to not count in the search engines and crawling bots in the number of guests online figure?

Punbb w/coppermine and wordpress integrated

see my hack to integrate punbb with wordpress comment system.
Illustration Community

nickfzx's Website

  • From: U.S.A.
  • Registered: 2005-08-26
  • Posts: 1,607

Re: too many guests - damn robots

/*
    Quick 'n Dirty solution to keep (most) bots off the online list
    Place somewhere around the top of include/common.php
    Add user agent strings to $spiders as needed
*/

$spiders = array
(

    // Google
    'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)',
    'Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)',
    'Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)',
    'Googlebot-Image/1.0',
    // Gigabot
    'Gigabot/2.0/gigablast.com/spider.html',
    'Gigabot/2.0 (http://www.gigablast.com/spider.html)',
    'Gigabot/2.0',
    'Gigabot/1.0',
    // MSN
    'msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)',
    'msnbot/0.9 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)',
    'msnbot/0.11 ( http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)',
    'MSNBOT/0.1 (http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)',
    // Yahoo
    'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)',

);

if(in_array($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], $spiders))
    define('PUN_QUIET_VISIT', 1);
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  • From: Oxford, UK
  • Registered: 2006-05-11
  • Posts: 133

Re: too many guests - damn robots

hey thanks

...how up to date is the list of bots?  is there a place to get a updated list?

Punbb w/coppermine and wordpress integrated

see my hack to integrate punbb with wordpress comment system.
Illustration Community

nickfzx's Website

  • From: U.S.A.
  • Registered: 2005-08-26
  • Posts: 1,607

Re: too many guests - damn robots

I'm not sure, I got them from http://www.useragentstring.com/

I was originally going to use the list from my "Bot Hide" mod (it's on Punres) but I decided it was too out-of-date and found the aforementioned site on Google. If you want to be extra paranoid you can add the list from that mod.

If you want you can do a Google search to verify these UA strings and/or find additional ones.

It'd be helpful to at least temporarily use a PHP-based statistics package on your forum so you can find out exactly what bots are visiting (and their user agent strings), but it might not be worth the hassle or the slowdown.

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  • From: Oxford, UK
  • Registered: 2006-05-11
  • Posts: 133

Re: too many guests - damn robots

i may take a look at your bot hide mod

basically i often have around 100 guests online and only 1 or two members...so it looks a little strange and I would like to get the guests figure down to a more realistic figure.

Punbb w/coppermine and wordpress integrated

see my hack to integrate punbb with wordpress comment system.
Illustration Community

nickfzx's Website

  • From: U.S.A.
  • Registered: 2005-08-26
  • Posts: 1,607

Re: too many guests - damn robots

Well, I'd first try what I just posted, then check to see how things are going in a few hours.

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