Vistors count should exclude counting BOTs

[theologian]

Forum URL: colossians.freeforums.net

Hi there.

At present BOTs seem to be counted as visitors, so it is difficult to know just how many human beings are visiting my site.

Also it seems that when a BOT visits a thread, the thread visits count also goes up.

It is possible to exclude BOT visits from these 2 counts? If it is not currently possible, would the site maintenance crew consider implementing an enhancement in this regard?

Thanks

Theologian

[Craig]

Hi

Unfortunately, it is not currently possible, but i have labelled this as a feature feature for consideration.

Craig

[theologian]

Thanks for that Craig.

Often I get a cluster of 4 or 5 BOTS all on at once (often with IP addresses beginning with "66."). If I go to my site right now and edit a thread, there will immediately be at least 2 BOTS viewing that thread, which adds to the views count.

So any progress in this regard, would be appreciated, as it's been going on since day dot.

[Michael]

Hi,

I'll leave the feature request label but even if we were to implement something that excluded bots it would by no means be foolproof as plenty of bots do not identify as such.

Regardless of that, views would still be counted. You want search bots to index your forum often for the best Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you want to eliminate bots all you need to do is enable "Guests Must Login" from the admin panel.

[theologian]

HI Michael

Thanks for your reply.

What I would imagine would be an algorithm which enters the visitor IP in an IP Botcheck site (there are plenty of these) BEFORE the visitor actually gets to view the site, and if it returns a positive (i.e the visitor is a BOT), the visitor is not allowed to progress to the site and that IP is added to a ban list automatically for the entire pro-boards website.

So what I'm imagining is a preliminary 'filter' before the bot actually gets to its target forum.

I realise this would entail a lot of lookups, but I'm sure such a procedure would already be in place commercially around the world, as I can't imagine a lot of companies putting up with thousands of BOT visits.

Perhaps it's worth asking around as to what might be available?

[Nscalerr 🐺]

Nov 20, 2019 1:10:53 GMT -8 theologian said:

HI Michael
What I would imagine would be an algorithm which enters the visitor IP in an IP Botcheck site (there are plenty of these) BEFORE the visitor actually gets to view the site, and if it returns a positive (i.e the visitor is a BOT), the visitor is not allowed to progress to the site and that IP is added to a ban list automatically for the entire pro-boards website.

This would also block every single search engine spider, thus making sure that every single Proboards forum never appears anywhere in search results in Google, Bing, etc.......

Not all bots / spiders are malicious!

The way I envision this being done, is if a connection identifies as a bot, then a seperate entry be made in the info center called bots with which ones they are. Btw on a certain competitions software that does in fact happen.