Plugins and Agents and Scripts, Oh my...

[David LeBow]

And I thought that I was trying something simple...

I have a little plugin, short and stout:

PHP Code:

$Rotatordata = file_get_contents('http://www.MySite.Com/Rotator.asp'); 


The output of the asp page gets inserted in the header template like this:

PHP Code:

$Rotatordata 


It's some custom ad rotator logic. Works like a charm. Then I thought I'd get clever and query the HTTP User Agent within the ASP's VBScript, something like this:

sAgent = Request.ServerVariables ("HTTP_USER_AGENT")

I'd like to disregard requests from web crawlers. If I request Rotator.asp from the browser, everything's fine. Once I embed it as shown above into the PHP Scripting and template in vBulletin, sAgent always returns an empty string.

Googling, I stumbled on this, but don't know to what extent it's true:

"file("yoururl"); will read the page and send an empty UA [User Agent] by default, this is sometimes done to filter your page, remove javascript, flash or java."

I expect that file and file_get_contents act in a similar way in this regard (?).

My question: is there any way to get at the user agent within the asp within the plugin called by PHP script within the VBulletin template?

Thanks in advance for any input.