Avoid counting robots

noobie34

I want to avoid counting robots who visit my site.
The existing script does this

$agent=$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
//echo "$agent<br>";
if (!(eregi("bot",$agent)||eregi("pompos",$agent)||eregi("Yahoo",$agent)||eregi("quepasa",$agent)))
{
counting code
}

Each time I detect an aggressive robot I have to add it to the list above. This means modifying 10 or more pages.

Is there a simpler way to do this? I can't put the entire counting code in a file and include it because the counting code is different for each page.

buraks78

have you tried looking into robots.txt ?

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

drawmack

why not keep the list of bot names in an array in an include file, then you can loop through that array in your if statement on each page.

noobie34

On second thoughts, since Firefox, Firebird, Konqueror, IE Explorer and many other browsers have the string Mozilla wouldn't it be a better idea to check for this string as:

$agent=$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
if (eregi("mozilla",$agent){
counting code
}

Then I would be taking into account 95% or so visitors and guarding against some unknown bot registering a few thousand hits in a few hours.

drawmack

as long as missing abt 5% of your visitors on the counts isn't a problem that should work just fine.

noobie34

What drawmack says is, I think, the only option. I have adopted it because now almost all the bots use Mozilla in their user string

Originally posted by drawmack
why not keep the list of bot names in an array in an include file, then you can loop through that array in your if statement on each page.