hey,

I have a PHP counter script i made which basically saves ip, datetime and useragent to database and if that ip HASNT visited the site for a minimum of 24 hours adds 1 to the counter.

I have LOTS of yahoo slurp hits everyday and it messin up the counter so i want to be able to have a list (or array) of bots i want NOT to be counted and instead want it inserted a sep thing.

anyway im really not with it today so how woul do if(useragent == LIST_OF_BOTS_USERAGENTs) { add to bot total } else { add to normal total?

thanks.

If you used ASP.NET, it would be if(noCountList.Contains(userAgent)) { ; } else { ; }. If PHP is a decent language like everyone says, you can do the same thing with slightly different syntax. If not, you can make a for loop to run through every item in the array until you find a match or hit the end. That's slow, but if you only have a few in the list it won't matter so much.

You might be better off counting hits from known browsers and excluding everything else? You could use a Regular Expression so as not to have to hard code every different version, but that protects you when Yahoo renames their bot, or Joe Blow makes one and runs it on your site.

I was actually researching this a couple days ago. You can set your code like this:

NOTE: i don't actually know what the names of the bots are so i improvised

PHP Code:

<?php

// define your array
$bot_list = array ( 'YAHOO', 'GOOGLE', 'ASK', 'ALEXA' );

// get the user agent
$user_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

foreach ( $bot_list AS $bot_list ) 
{ 
    if ( strstr ( $user_agent, $bot_list ) )
    {
        // a bot is on the site!
    }
}

?>

Here is a block of spider detection code I got from an adaptation from zencart. The session start if the spider flag is set true is only an option.

PHP Code:

<?php
  
  $user_agent = strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
  $spider_flag = false;
  
   if (!empty($user_agent))
   {
     $spiders = file('spiders.txt');
     for ($i = 0; $i < count($spiders); $i++)
     {
       if (!empty($spiders[$i]))
       {
         if (is_integer(strpos($user_agent, trim($spiders[$i]))))
         {
           $spider_flag = true;
           break;
         }
       }
     }
   }
   
   if ($spider_flag === false)
   {
     session_start();
     $session_started = true;
   }
  
?>

spiders.txt

Thanks Mgraphic that looks like the best way i will have yo get this when im at home (god knows why im at school at 8am but hey im not walking in this weather *holds ears because of noise of heavy rain on roof*)

thanks as well microcolt

okay one question, how do i do the thing with php to send dif headers?

i want to just make a quick testing script which has a text field and a select field, select has all the dif useragents and bots and the text for a url so i can jsut access that site/page and pretend to be something else for testing?

Thansk