Spider Watcher

Spider Watcher
Author: Mikel Beck (mikel.beck@elite-computing.net)

This hack keeps track of the spiders (Search Engine robots) that visit your fourm. Every time a guest visits a page, the guest's IP address, user agent and the page they visited are logged to the database.

When somebody views the spider statistics page, this data is "rolled up", meaning the raw data is collated, the spider's name is determined by comparing the user agent to data contained in the spiders_bulletin.xml file, and the number of pages and visits is summarized and writted back to the database. In addition, and data from non-bots is removed.

The data is then displayed in a easy to read format for your viewing pleasure.

If the user viewing the report has permissions to view IP addresses, these are displayed as well.

A live version of the report from one of my sites can be seen here: http://www.happyhourpub.com/spiders.php

Also see the attached screenshot for an exmaple.


Revision History:
1.0.0 Beta 1 - 01/05/2006
- Initial Release

1.0.0 Beta 2 - 01/06/2006
- Included templates for spiders.php
- Removed text from templates, added them as phrases

1.0.0 Beta 3 - 01/07/2006
- Split up the display of "known" and "unknown" spiders

1.0.0 Beta 4 - 01/25/2006
- Corrected potentional SQL injection issue in plug-in
- Reduced the number of SQL queries required to display statistics
- Corrected date/time display issue

1.0.0 Beta 5 - 02/01/2006
- Reduced the number of SQL queries required to display statistics

1.0.0 Beta 6 - 02/08/2006
- No release

1.0.0 Beta 7 - 02/11/2006
- Corrected issue with "unknown" spiders not being displayed properly.
- Added tracking of the type of spider (searchspider, link checker, etc)

1.0.0 Beta 8 - 02/19/2006
- Change the display of IP addresses to be a pop-up so they're all not displayed on the main page.
- Combined the spiders that have the same name but different user agents.

1.0.0 Beta 9 - 03/10/2006
- Changed the display to group similar spiders together (search spiders, http check spiders, etc)

1.0.0 Beta 10 - 08/08/2006
- Changed how the rollup functions. Instead of rolling up every time somebody views the spider page, it rolls up once per hour.
- Corrected a few bugs here and there, mostly related to removing entries from the database.

Installation Instructions
1. Upload spiders.php to the root of your forum.
2. Upload spiders_rollup.php to the includes/cron directory.
3. Import the file product-spiderwatcher.xml using the Manage Products module.
4. Add a link to spiders.php on your navbar or footer.
5. Add a cron job with the following information:
Title: Spider Watcher Rollup
Day of the Week: *
Day of the Month: *
Hour: *
Minute: 0 - - -
Log entries: Yes
Filename: ./includes/cron/spiders_rollup.php

Upgrade Instructions
1. Upload (and overwrite) spiders to the root of your forum.
2. Upload spiders_rollup.php to the includes/cron directory.
3. Import the file product-spiderwatcher.xml using the Manage Products module. Make sure the "Allow Overwrite" option is set to "Yes".
4. Add a link to spiders.php on your navbar or footer.
5. Add a cron job with the following information:
Title: Spider Watcher Rollup
Day of the Week: *
Day of the Month: *
Hour: *
Minute: 0 - - -
Log entries: Yes
Filename: ./includes/cron/spiders_rollup.php

***UPGRADE NOTE***
When you upgrade from version 1.0.0 Beta 7 to 1.0.0 Beta 8 your existing spider data will be lost!

To make sure that you can decode the maximum amount of spiders, you should grab the latest spiderlist.xml and replace the spiders_vbulletin.xml file in your forumhome/includes/xml/ directory with the one from this thread: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76662

[The Notorious]

This hack killed my server today, was working fine today but it's messed my SQL and turned the server down.
I got like hundreds of e-mails like this one:

Database error in vBulletin 3.5.4:

Invalid SQL:
INSERT INTO spider_watcher (nice_bot, bot, ip_address, page, type, info, timestamp) VALUES ('Unknown Spider','Mozilla/4.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)','1198658994','index','','', NOW());

MySQL Error : Duplicate entry '431497' for key 1
Error Number : 1062
Date : Sunday, April 30th 2006 @ 08:17:10 PM

[mikelbeck]

Originally Posted by The Notorious

This hack killed my server today, was working fine today but it's messed my SQL and turned the server down.
I got like hundreds of e-mails like this one:

Database error in vBulletin 3.5.4:

Invalid SQL:
INSERT INTO spider_watcher (nice_bot, bot, ip_address, page, type, info, timestamp) VALUES ('Unknown Spider','Mozilla/4.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)','1198658994','index','','', NOW());

MySQL Error : Duplicate entry '431497' for key 1
Error Number : 1062
Date : Sunday, April 30th 2006 @ 08:17:10 PM

I don't think this error was caused by this hack... The key that it's complaining about is an auto_increment field, as far as I know there's no way to force it to try to insert a duplicate key like this is reporting. And the sql line shown above does not have anything about the key field that it's complaining about.

[mikelbeck]

Originally Posted by LiveWire

great hack, but there lays a very crtitcal problem for me at least. When viewing the page.

Page generated in 0.59078 seconds with 50 queries [Server Loads: 0.41 0.22 : 0.10]

Thats quite alot of quires. The more spiders it fetches, the more queires this adds.

True, and I don't see any way to reduce those queries right now. The only thing I can think of to do is to run a job that will occasionaly "roll up" the spider data, and then when you view the spiders page it will only display data that's already been collated. But then the data displayed won't always be up to date. If anybody else has any ideas, I'm open to suggestions.

[The Notorious]

Originally Posted by mikelbeck

I don't think this error was caused by this hack... The key that it's complaining about is an auto_increment field, as far as I know there's no way to force it to try to insert a duplicate key like this is reporting. And the sql line shown above does not have anything about the key field that it's complaining about.

Well as soon as I removed the hack it started working fine...

[The Notorious]

I started to get the same e-mails again. Can you tell me exactly what this hack modifies on my board so I can look if anything is left after the uninstall?
Thanks

[mikelbeck]

Originally Posted by The Notorious

I started to get the same e-mails again. Can you tell me exactly what this hack modifies on my board so I can look if anything is left after the uninstall?
Thanks

If you used the un-install function, it should have removed everything.

It creates a few plug-ins:
Spider Watcher
Spiders Location (Part 1)
Spiders Location (Part 2)
Spider Watcher Template Group

and it creates a few template in the "Spider Watcher Templates" group.

[hambil]

Originally Posted by mikelbeck

True, and I don't see any way to reduce those queries right now. The only thing I can think of to do is to run a job that will occasionaly "roll up" the spider data, and then when you view the spiders page it will only display data that's already been collated. But then the data displayed won't always be up to date. If anybody else has any ideas, I'm open to suggestions.

It's not a high traffic page. A lot of users jump onto the 'queries bad' bandwaggen a little to quickly. Queries make the vb world run.

[The Notorious]

Originally Posted by mikelbeck

If you used the un-install function, it should have removed everything.

It creates a few plug-ins:
Spider Watcher
Spiders Location (Part 1)
Spiders Location (Part 2)
Spider Watcher Template Group

and it creates a few template in the "Spider Watcher Templates" group.

Thanks mate, I stopped getting the e-mails and sever is running just fine.

[Dr.Viggy]

nice hack, thanks.

*installed

[mikelbeck]

Originally Posted by The Notorious

Thanks mate, I stopped getting the e-mails and sever is running just fine.

With or without this hack installed?