[ic] question regarding entry in usertrack log

[Mike Heins]

Quoting John Young (john_young at sonic.net):
> Christopher Wenham wrote:
> >On Friday 30 April 2004 01:07, John Young wrote:
> >
> >>What was the corresponding User Agent string from your web server
> >>access log?  Mine contained AskBar (the 'Ask' is what made it 'nsession').
> >>
> >>Anyone know if AskBar can cause that behavior, or whether or not
> >>AskBar in the UA should trigger no session, for that matter?
> >
> >
> > It's matching against "Ask" in interchange.cfg's RobotUA section, so 
> >Interchange thinks it's a bot. I don't know what AskBar is yet, but I 
> >recently had to remove "Ask" from the RobotUA list because a customer 
> >wasn't able to check out -- without a session they couldn't put anything 
> >in their cart or log in to their account.
> 
> 
> I believe this is AskBar:  http://www.askbar.com/about.cfm
> 
> I poorly worded my last question above -- was essentially asking
> if anyone thought that Ask should remain in RobotUA.  I'm following
> your answer anyway, for now, and removing it.  Thanks for mentioning
> your experience, Chris.
> 
> Along those same lines, I have removed spider*.proxy.aol.com from
> RobotHost.  I'm hoping RobotUA will keep any actual AOL spiders
> known as such; however, I was seeing normal user sessions sometimes
> using spider*.proxy.aol.com as caching/proxy servers.  A single
> visitor's traffic would look something like:
> 
> 20031215	WYdRD8dV:aol.com	cache-mtc-ah05.proxy.aol.com
> 20031215	WYdRD8dV:aol.com	cache-mtc-ak02.proxy.aol.com
> 20031215	WYdRD8dV:aol.com	cache-mtc-ab01.proxy.aol.com
> 20031215	nsession:aol.com	spider-ntc-td062.proxy.aol.com
> 20031215	WYdRD8dV:aol.com	cache-ntc-ad06.proxy.aol.com
> 20031215	WYdRD8dV:aol.com	cache-ntc-aa07.proxy.aol.com
> 
> It was somewhat rare, and it looks like it would usually return to the
> correct session (I'm guessing due to me including the session id in
> hidden CGI variables)... but I removed it from RobotHost anyway to see
> what happens.

I think we are going to put a NotRobotUA directive in, that would
allow:

	NotRobotUA   googlebar,toolbar,askbar

This probably won't go in until 5.3/5.4, though.

-- 
Mike Heins
Perusion -- Expert Interchange Consulting    http://www.perusion.com/
phone +1.765.647.1295  tollfree 800-949-1889 <mike at perusion.com>

Experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake the second
time you make it. -- unknown