Quote Originally Posted by Woodymon View Post
I just posted my thoughts as they just came to head. I've been using the UT mod for 6-7 years now, and hadn't even thought about some of this before.

Enjoying your new functionality/configuration.

Regards to the option to show spiders, how does the UT mod define a specific session/IP as a spider or not? Does the UT mod look up the UA in /includes/spider.txt to identify a spider? The file last updated May 2011.
I would say that it is/was a good question about the DAT file. I took up to modifying this like many have, I use it, would like to see more features and think that a majority of the features seem to be something discussed throughout the thread, so why not implement them even if they are not something I currently need.

As for the added spider functionality, well, the evolution of it to this point is that initially (as many probably had seen) there was always one type of "browser" (visitor) that would show up in the list of tracked users; however, it was readily apparent that it was some sort of automated website checker because no person could hit 5+ pages in as few seconds. At the same time I would open the Who's Online option and see that no one was there, unless I turned the spider related view on. Then it was obvious that UT was not filtering out those type of views; however, at the same time I happened across another "visitor" that wasn't being logged by UT. A little review of the who's online functionality identified a few different things that work together to identify/hide spiders. Further review identified that the current method of capturing the visitor information only partially implemented the filtering used by who's online. The portion that appeared to be missing was the look at the session id to determine if it was or was not present. So, I added that check which predominantly resolved the original issue I was having/seeing. If I remember correctly a session is not assigned if the visitor matches criteria within the spiders.txt file, so it became evident that if I could do a check for the assignment (or lack) of a session (which who's online does with the function that was added) then it would be possible to show/obscure that information and indirectly use the spiders.txt file.

But, looking at the code for capturing the visitor information it is/was significantly different from what is used in Who's Online, so that is still something I want to modify/merge, but I also don't want to break it. :) Meaning, I want to actually focus on that area of the code and give it attention rather than just implementing this or that "small" feature. In my opinion the process will be a little complex because I'll be pullling from multiple areas of Who's Online to be consolidated and reorganized into UT to maintain the same available information.

As part of that resequencing/formatting, I was considering adding a notification flag (yes likely an additional table field and therefore use a few more bytes of data storage and communication) to indicate calls to a website with a mal-formed url... \'A=0... for example. If nothing else, that way would be able to identify sessions that are either of interest or to be ignored when reviewing data. (And yes could offer another choice box as a result to look at incorrect URLs versus correct URLs...)

I apologize for the two malformed SQL statements in the new_install.sql file. The thought process I used to modify it seemed sound; however, was wrong. When I tried to concatenate the two texts and then look at my database, I could tell it was wrong and then when I used a format like the original package it worked... I could have tested it before distributing, but didn't. I do know that also I felt like working on this particular plug-in (considering how long it had been since an update) would offer me some "simple" opportunities to learn more about how ZC works and how to work with some of the integration with various parts of it. It's been a tremendous learning experience...

So, hope that provides a little enlightment. :)