Removing crawlers, spyders, bots from Who's Online?

[rcrosier]

Hi,

Is it possible to filter OUT all the spyders, googlebots, crawlers, etc., from the "Who's Online" page?

I don't really want or need to see these all the time, and I'd like to filter them out, so I only see the most likely customers online.

is there any relatively easy code change to NOT show all the PINK items?

Thanks.

[stevesh]

Don't know what 'the PINK items' are, but have you considered just turning off the sidebox? Visitors don't care who's online, and you can see who's visiting from Admin. It's just screen clutter to me.

[gjh42]

I believe the OP is talking about the admin page.

[afo]

I believe the OP is talking about the admin page.

I think so, too, and I don't know of any way to turn that off.

[tacoma]

I'd like to know how it decides who's a bot and who isn't.

I'd like to know if I can manually add known bot ips to a bot list?

I get a handful of bots that are given session ids because they are treated as a human user, and that bothers me.

For example there are some MSN bots that don't get counted as bots even though the log shows them to be. Host: msnbot-65-55-109-97.search.msn.com.

[kiddo]

About line 251 in admin/whos_online.php find:

<?php
$ip_array = array();
$d=0;
while (!$whos_online->EOF) {
$time_online = (time() - $whos_online->fields['time_entry']);

And add two line like this:

<?php
$ip_array = array();
$d=0;
while (!$whos_online->EOF) {
$bot=zen_check_bot($whos_online->fields['session_id']);
if($bot){$whos_online->MoveNext();continue;}
$time_online = (time() - $whos_online->fields['time_entry']);

That will make the pinkies not show.

[rcrosier]

Thanks to all who responded.

The response from Kiddo did the trick. I appreciate your input greatly.

[Ajeh]

Not showing the bots isn't making them not get sessions ...

Adding bots to the /includes/spiders.txt is ... via their User Agent ...

The problem is the bots that cheat and do not pass this information ... for those that you see, if you can, complain to the folks that send them and tell them to get with the program ... maybe, they will listen ...

NOTE: To see the "pink" bots ... you do need to store your sessions to the database ...

[rcrosier]

All I wanted was to not "see" them in my "who's online" listing...
But is it causing me some hidden problem(s) by doing this?

I have not noticed anything bad since I implemented this code change to filter them out...

When you add them to your spiders.txt file, do you use the entire domain name? If not, what part do you add?

Thanks.

[Ajeh]

View the spiders.txt file and try looking for:
msnbot
yahoo
google

to give you an idea how the User Agent is utilized for this ...

The whos_online will show the User Agent that identifies these ... when that code blocking spiders is not active ...

You are not hurting anything by not "seeing" these ...

Note: if you click to sort the whos_online by the Name, it will group Guests, Customers and Spiders for you ...