GoogleBot

I can only think it'd have something to do with that.

And I agree, this'd be very cool, although I'd like to add support for the MSNbot etc also (which I can only assume wouldn't be much harder to do).

af3, are you sure that will work? I thought that would only show googlebot on for google bot wouldn't it? Because it's seeing if the user agent is googlebot, so if it isn't google bot nobody else will see google bot listed as online would they?

I'm pretty sure there is more to it than that.

Guys -- i was asking if the code would work, obviously not at all. just a thought: since google bot comes from an ip, can we check the IP and use this somehow to detect googlebot presence? i dont know how though.

when a user visit the page, the set_default_user() in function.php is called. can we put some code like this within that to update the online users lists?

    $googlespiders = array("Froogle", "Googlebot");
    foreach($googlespiders as $onlinebot) {
      if(ereg($onlinebot, $HTTP_USER_AGENT)) {
          if ($onlinebot == "Googlebot") {
            if (substr($REMOTE_HOST, 0, 11) == "209.185.253.") $onlinebot = "Googlebot Deep Crawl";
            elseif (substr($REMOTE_HOST, 0,7) == "64.209.") $onlinebot = "Google Crawler";
// then try to insert to database
            mysql_query ("INSERT INTO bots (name) VALUES ('$onlinebot')");
          }
      }
  }

ps: i'm not a php coder. just an idea.

Connorhd, do you know how I would go about getting this to work? I'd be interesting in writing the mod myself if somebody could point me to the right tables/information to access/modify for it to work.

Thanks.

Connorhd, I actually found a simple solution to this. Instead of using ANY database connectivity I keep a file that stores information about the Bot's Display Name, the Bot's Identity (HTTP_USER_AGENT), and the timestamp for the bot's last visit. Has delimiters and such for multiple bots. I just have it so that it displays the bot's name if it has visited in the last 5 minutes.

So all I had to do was include the php file i wrote that does all that, and determine what I want to do if it returns data when I call the function.

EDIT:
If you're interested in seeing in action, first go here: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/inte … /index.htm (a bot spoofer)

Enter the url http://programming-designs.com/forums/index.php and choose either Google, MSN, Yahoo, Alexa-1, or the Yahoo-Slurp bot.

After you spoofed the visit, go to my forums and look at users online: http://programming-designs.com/forums

^ I can't notice a slow down really, but until I learn more about PunBB and creating tables/modifying them this will have to do xD