Show BOT guests as a pseudo-user instead of a guest, most of my guests are BOTs and I want my number of guests to be more accurate and not include BOTs

List of BOT IPs: http://iplists.com/

Edit: Also can it be possible to prevent the BOTs to get in member only areas? (PMs, Admin Panel, etc.)

Bots see as much guests do. So I doubt they can see Member only area's. Unless you have the boards open to categories. and only staff members are allowed to see the Admin Panel.

But I think that would be good to show the names of Bots like on phpBB, Google[Bot].

When I look at who's where I will see "guests" in PMs or Admin Panel

I don't think that's true. I see the same thing, but as a guest you can't access those area's at all.

They are crawler BOTs

Yeah, but they are considered Guests. if you put your forum to member only or in Maintenance mode, guests (including Google) can only see the members only and MM part.

If you go to the page that you would normally go to to see PMs as a guest, it'd show you an error but still register you as viewing that area. That's where the confusion lies.

There's no chance that a bot can see what a member can see, so don't worry.

What about Admin Panel?

Same thing. No one other than staff can view the admin panel it's just as if you were a guest and tried to view http://support.virtualforums.co.uk/action/admin it's not possible.

I have been considering this for a while. At least to identify the main bots such as Google Bot, Google Adsense, Bing etc.

And as said, there is no way bots can see member only areas. Those who say they're viewing PMs or admin areas are most likely ad-crawlers (trying to determine the best ads to display). They just see either an error message or a login form.

I would just like my guests online and my guests today to be more accurate so that BOTs would not be counted towards the total

I have something to add to this, if possible in the templates with showing of members add BOTs like:

Staff
Members
BOTs

Including which ones are online or have been online today in a separate list from Staff and Members

This is now being tried out on this support forum to see how well it works

Nice

How do you have it?
Will it be like:
{staff_online}
{members_online}
{bots_online}
Or something along those lines?

I see the Yahoo[Bot] in the info center. Looks good to me!

this better be something called for a second tag or something, or can be turned off i think it would look tacky

Posted By Aiken on 11th Jan 10 at 1:24pm

 

Nice

How do you have it?
Will it be like:
{staff_online}
{members_online}
{bots_online}
Or something along those lines?

It's not yet built into the templating system as separate tags, we're seeing how the detection goes first.

It's not yet decided how this would be used. There are a few options:

- Introduce a new template tag which lists the users online without bots
- Introduce a new template tag which lists just the bots online
- Have a Forum Settings which decides if bots are shown or not
- Only show bots to Staff Members

All opinions welcome

Forum Settings:
- Display Bots
-- Guests
-- Members
-- Staff
-- Off

A tag just for bots would work VERY well for how I have my info center set up

I think it should be separate from online users. As you described it could have separate tags. Like {bots_online} or something, and the total for the bots should be different from regular guest/members total. Like {Bots_online_total} or something.

Or something like on the info center, [bots] and you can click on it, and it shows the bots that are online now and were online in a pop up box, like the guest box does.

The first part is what I would like

In my info center have:

Staff Online
Members Online
-blank line-

I could have BOTs Online in that blank line

It does seem that the info center of support has been changed to display BOTs differently

Posted By Aiken on 16th Jan 10 at 12:25am

 

It does seem that the info center of support has been changed to display BOTs differently

Yup, shows the bots online, and also lists them separately!

Which is similar to how I have my info center set up, I have members and staff separated and I'll also have BOTs separated