Added bots in userlist

Post by **otseng** » Sun Jan 09, 2005 5:13 pm

I've added bots (spiders) to the userlist. Now, instead of a bot being counted as a guest, it will be displayed as a spider.

Spongemom · Post by **Spongemom** » Sun Jan 09, 2005 5:24 pm

And this means....? What do the bots do?

Post by **otseng** » Sun Jan 09, 2005 7:26 pm

The bots are crawlers from search engines that are going through the site and adding stuff to their index. After they index the site, then you can use that search engine to search for stuff on this forum.

So, for example, you can use Google to search for Spongemom. Or you can use Yahoo (Inktomi) to search for atheist. Or you can use MSN to search for Flood.

On a practical level, are there any reasons to view which bot is indexing the site? None really. But, it's just interesting to know when they are visiting the site.

Vladd44 · Post by **Vladd44** » Sun Jan 09, 2005 9:22 pm

is this a phpbb mod u found? IF so where?

If not, do you plan on releasing it? I see your active on phpbb forums.

PS. i logged onto your forum reporting my agent as googlebot to see if it worked.... not sure if it was the real thing or me, but it showed up in list.

Post by **otseng** » Sun Jan 09, 2005 9:55 pm

Vladd44 wrote:is this a phpbb mod u found? IF so where?

Sort of. You have to install the Bot Indexing MOD. Then you have to add a hack to display the bots. I then tweaked it a bit to fit the PCP mod that I have installed. Then after some debugging, it worked.

PS. i logged onto your forum reporting my agent as googlebot to see if it worked.... not sure if it was the real thing or me, but it showed up in list.

That probably was you. Google hasn't revisted recently. How'd you fake it to be a googlebot?

Vladd44 · Post by **Vladd44** » Sun Jan 09, 2005 10:20 pm

Well there are some more difficult ways, but i used an easy one.

I use Mozilla as a browser.

there is an extension for it called UserAgent Switch. That allows you to report as a variety of browsers. Or create your own custom agents.

On another note, for that 22% of users out there who have already made the switch........

There is a extension for mozilla called BBCode that is great. A simple right click will give you the ability to paste text as ural, conditional ural, bold, italics, font size, colors, colors, quotes, smiles, images etc. No need to manually configure any coding.

And one more plug, its all opensource and free, is the Bible Tollbar. I find it indispensable.

And thanks, for the info. I think I'm going to look into adding bot traffic in active users. I recently removed sids for specific user agents. Its actually what caused me to go find the useragent switch. I wanted an easy way to verify the mod was working.

Post by **otseng** » Sun Jan 09, 2005 11:01 pm

Vladd44 wrote: there is an extension for it called UserAgent Switch. That allows you to report as a variety of browsers. Or create your own custom agents.

Cool. Thanks for the tip.