[ic] Robots

Stefan Hornburg (Racke) racke at linuxia.de
Wed Nov 18 18:50:04 UTC 2009


Ron Phipps wrote:
> Stefan Hornburg (Racke) wrote:
>> Hello, Interchange enthusiasts!
>>
>> Today I got a report about a customer who wasn't able to order in an
>> Interchange store.
>>
>> It turned out that the user had the Ask toolbar installed and the 
>> robots.cfg
>> wasn't up-to-date, so the session was dropped.
>>
>> You probably agree with me that preventing orders is really a
>> bad thing.
>>
>> Recognition of robots by examining the UserAgent string is of course 
>> error
>> prone and false positives are possible.
>>
>> Robots who successfully login to an Interchange store are unlikely to 
>> exist.
>> In this case Interchange should loudly scream into the logfiles about 
>> that
>> and leave an useful error message for the user.
>>
>> Also Kevin Walsh used to manage the default settings in robots.cfg, 
>> but he
>> is not available anymore. Anyone else who would manage this task?
>>
>> Regards
>>          Racke
>>
> 
> Racke,
> 
> Do you happen to know what browser and version was installed along with 
> the Ask toolbar and how the UserAgent came across that caused the 
> session to be dropped?  We are seeing session dropping periodically and 
> this could be the cause.
> 

The UserAgent was:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; TOB 6.05; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; 
GTB6; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; 
.NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; AskTB5.4)

I correlated "Successful logins" with nsession as session id
in the catalog log file with Apache access log entries.

Adding the NotRobotUA directive fixed the problem.

Regards
          Racke


-- 
LinuXia Systems => http://www.linuxia.de/
Expert Interchange Consulting and System Administration
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Interchange Development Team




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