Member Bots 1.0 - Allow bots to act as members

--------- Member Bots 1.0 ---------
Written by Trilljester - http://www.trilliummud.com

This small mod allows you to treat search engine robots (i.e. GoogleBot, Yahoo Slurp) as registered users instead of guests, as they are treated by default in VBulletin.

This is handy if your site allows limited access to guests, but full access to registered users. By default, a search engine robot would only be allowed to index what a guest could see, but with this mod, it would allow them to fully index your site as a registered user.

This mod uses the spiders_vbulletin.xml file for determining if a visitor is a bot or not, so make sure you have that file up to date. The one that comes with VB is pretty sparse, but it works. If you're only interested in GoogleBot, then the default file works great.

WARNING! This mod requires a very small edit to a VBulletin core file. This means whenever you upgrade to a new version of VBulletin, you'll need to re-do this edit, if you overwrite this file. If the idea of editing a VBulletin core file bothers you, don't install this mod! I won't be held responsible for your forum being fouled up. This mod is very safe however, so don't fret.

Install Instructions:

1. Unzip the product-memberbot.xml file on your system.

2. Go to your VBulletin AdminCP and click on Manage Products under the Plugin Manager section.

3. Click on Add/Import Product.

4. Click on Browse on the first line (Upload the XML from your computer) and locate the product-memberbot.xml file. Click on Import to upload it to the system.

5. Click on Plugin Manager, and ensure that the new plugin named Bot Checker, which is found under the init_startup hook, is enabled.

6. Now the fun part, you'll need to edit the core VBulletin file init.php which is located in the includes directory under your forum home.

For example, if your forum home is located in /home/blah/forum, then init.php is in /home/blah/forum/includes

If you can edit the file on the server without having to download it, more power to you.

In init.php, find this line (should be near the very bottom of the file, it was line 403 in mine):

if (!empty($db->explain))

Add ABOVE this line:

if ($is_bot == 1) {
        $vbulletin->userinfo['usergroupid'] = 2;
}

NOTE: My registered users group is ID #2. Yours may be different, you may change this to any group ID you like.

7. Save init.php and upload back to your server if you had to download the file to edit it.

If you're editing on the server, save it, and that's it!

================================================== ========
That's it! Search Engine bots should now "see" your forum as a regular user, not a guest.

Questions, comments, improvements are more than welcome. Please use this thread as a cental support site. It makes it easier for me to help out. Also, you may visit my site and fire me off a PM for help, or just send a quick thanks or shout out.

Enjoy!
// trilljester

[Andreas]

<font size="3">Attention</font>
Using this Hack is to be considered cloaking your site, and you risk being banned from search engine indexes - like it recently happened to BMW.

[trilljester]

Andreas: Do you have official word from the search engines that this is cloaking?

Also, how do you explain the thousands of Invision based boards (which have this built in) that do exactly what this mod does, yet are NOT banned from the search engines? If this is cloaking, then what do you consider the "search engine friendly" archive as mentioned earlier in this thread?

[Andreas]

http://www.google.de/intl/us/webmasters/guidelines.html

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

(I am pretty sure other search engines have similar terms)

If a search engine indexes a Thread that is only accesable for Registered Users (or even worse only for paying users), and I access your site as a guest, I do get different content (a no permission error).
As you are intentionally allow search engines to spider content that is not publically accessable (to attract more users than there would be if you only had public content indexed), this is to be considered cloaking.

The search engine friendly archive is different in 2 ways:
a) I do get the same content through the archive as I do get through the forum
b) If I, as a Guest, access the archive I do get the exact same output as does a search engine spider.

Of course there are thousands of sites out there that are cloaking and still are indexed ... how many pages does Google have indexed?
Just because they are not discovered and remove yet, does not mean that they never will be.

If you come across sites that are cloaking, report them - this increases the chance of getting them removed.

[lionheart53]

I'm not an expert in this and don't know about the Google spider for content, but I do know that for adsense the contact at google I was emailing with specifically mentioned that it was okay for me to have adsense ads if I could set up a way for the google adsense spider to get in to the data even though the content normally requires login. So at least for that one bot I'm assuming they wouldn't call it cloaking since they told me to do it.

I'd be surprised if they called it cloaking if a user can get to that same data by logging in since you're then not giving different data, just requiring login. For paying for access, that may be something different since a regular person couldn't get to that data.

[trilljester]

Andreas: Would you agree that if you allow a spider to see content that only registered users (not paying) can see is not technically cloaking? Because all the incoming user has to do is register to see the content.

Maybe a mod on top of this one would be a "snippet" where the incoming visitor could see some of the first post in a thread, and would have to register to see the full content.

If you are charging users to see your forums and using this hack, then I agree 100%, it is cloaking, because you are now requiring a user to pay to see the content.

But for a simple 30 second registration requirement, that's really stretching the definition of "cloaking". One good example of why this could not be defined as cloaking is the New York Times. To see articles, you must create a free account. Yet, NYT articles pop up on search engines all the time. You'd think Google or Yahoo would be a little more inclined to ban a major site like the NYT as opposed to a small site like mine.

We could sit here and debate this until we turn blue. I go with my original edict. If you are worried about being banned from search engines then don't install this hack.

[Andreas]

It would still be cloaking, as I as a guest user cannot view the content.

Being able to view it when logged is not the solution; I as a user coming from a search engine result might not even be able to register at all or I might not want to do this.

EoD from my side

[Andreas]

Idea to make this a Plugin (untested):

Create a Bot User, set $_COOKIE[COOKIE_PREFIX . 'userid'] and $_COOKIE[COOKIE_PREFIX . 'password'] in init_startup accordingly.

[Moya]

Originally Posted by Andreas

It would still be cloaking, as I as a guest user cannot view the content.

Being able to view it when logged is not the solution; I as a user coming from a search engine result might not even be able to register at all or I might not want to do this.

EoD from my side

Hehehehe I don't mean to attack him or his hack, but I think we can test this out. We can try to search for subjects related to his link. Once we find one that require certain login to access the content, we report to google and ask for their opinion whether this is cloaking or not.

just my lousy 0.02

[trilljester]

Originally Posted by Moya

Hehehehe I don't mean to attack him or his hack, but I think we can test this out. We can try to search for subjects related to his link. Once we find one that require certain login to access the content, we report to google and ask for their opinion whether this is cloaking or not.

just my lousy 0.02

Example of what I'm talking about:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/po...hitehouse.html

I did a search on Google for: cheney shooting + new york times

The site comes back with a 1 sentence snippet from the article, but requires a registration to read the full article.

So, is it cloaking?

[treasureman]

trilljester,

I want to thank you for this mod! I have installed it and it is working beautifully! This is a standard feature with Invision board and I used it for 3 years with no problems.

For the VBulletin Developers who are so deadset against this mod: It is NOT cloaking! Cloaking is when you show different content to search engines than to users. With this mod we are showing the SAME content , it's just that the users have to register to see a little deeper into the site.

Cloaking is showing information to the search engines that is DIFFERENT or unrelated, such as pages stuffed with keywords or pages that are not relevant to your content, just to increase ranking. In other words cloaking is showing misleading content. This is not what this mod is about.