Hyoerlink clicks

NZ_Kiwis

I have a series of hyperlinks that I get commission from converted sales on. I want to keep a record of how many times each link is clicked plus a few other details, IP, Time, where they were at the time.

I thought I would link the viewer to a website of mine capture the details into a database and redirect them to the URL. I get all the robots/crawlers however and I want to exclude them as it’s useless to me.

What is the best way of doing this?

I had thought of using a on-click JavaScript but that’s not immune to robots is it?

laserlight

Check the headers for client details as such robots/crawlers generally identify themselves.

NZ_Kiwis

so what i block good robots from visiting redirect.php??

i could also block or capacha selected nations based on ip??

laserlight

Yes, before storing anything to the database. Unfortunately, this does require them to identify themselves, so as you say it only works for "good robots".

NZ_Kiwis

yeah but it would be safe to allow white listed nations ans good robots to bypass a capcha ?

natually i dont want to make it hard for referrals

laserlight

I have the impression that the reason why you want to identify robots/crawlers is so that you can exclude them from the action of "capture the details into a database and redirect them to the URL". If so, why do you need a CAPTCHA? If someone is trying to game the system, you may be able to tell via IP addresses, the referrer and say, the access times clustering, and besides, such fake visitors won't be converted into sales, right? If you enforce a CAPTCHA, then you're hurting genuine visitors who are being referred to your site.

sneakyimp

If you don't want bots visiting your page, you can easily exclude the well-behaved ones (i.e., "good bots") by putting your redirect script in your robots.txt file.

You can also check the USER AGENT against this list of bots with a fairly small amount of code I would imagine.

As for bad bots, these will likely be indistinguishable for the most part from users.

NZ_Kiwis

So I can do 3 steps

Block Good Bots
Check Bots against a DB
Block Countries IP (Russia)

otherwise allow user to continue

where can I get a list for point 2?

sneakyimp

For step 2, I posted a list of bots which would be a good starting point. You might also check out [man]get_browser[/man] which can tell you a lot about a visitor from the user agent string.

NZ_Kiwis

but the above link is a list of good bots - its not a database file? so i would need to create my own DB file and consistently update these??

sneakyimp

It's not all that hard. Here's a pretty simple code example:
http://www.beautifulcoding.com/snippets/178/a-simple-php-bot-checker-are-you-human/