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

[Snake]

<a href="https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=901722#post901722" target="_blank">https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showt...722#post901722</a>

Read the last few posts on the first page of this thread. I have also contacted a few SEO experts on vBSEO.com regarding this and they highly recommend me to completely disable this hack as it'll cause much trouble and damage to all the search engines out there.

[bashy]

Looks all ok to me m8, me not read anything in the thread that gives me cause for concern, some think it will and some think it wont lol...

One person has been in touch with google and still nothing has come of it...

[treasureman]

I have been using it for a year with no problems. Over 150,000 links in Google for my forum.

[Snake]

What is the URL to your forum, treasureman?

[treasureman]

Hi,

I do not publish the URL of my forum, sorry. It is a forum for professionals in a smaller sized profession, and it is very targeted to the profession only. Since it is a not a general interest forum I don't publish the URL here.

Really, I have no reason to lie about my experience with this mod, but if you don't want to use it, that's fine. I am just telling my experience from having used it a year. I have never had any problem with any of the search engines. I listed the engines I wanted to visit in the XML spyder file and left out the ones I didn't want to visit.

[Snake]

Originally Posted by treasureman

Hi,

I do not publish the URL of my forum, sorry. It is a forum for professionals in a smaller sized profession, and it is very targeted to the profession only. Since it is a not a general interest forum I don't publish the URL here.

Really, I have no reason to lie about my experience with this mod, but if you don't want to use it, that's fine. I am just telling my experience from having used it a year. I have never had any problem with any of the search engines. I listed the engines I wanted to visit in the XML spyder file and left out the ones I didn't want to visit.

One word: Bullsh!t.

[funinthesun]

I installed this and after making the edit to the init.php file and re-uploading, Iwas unable to log on to my admincp. I re-uploaded the original file and everything went back to normal.

[g00gl3r]

THis is a spot-on hack, will it work with 3.6?

[Style?]

can we see it in the 3.6.x

[Bacteria1]

its work here 100% on 3.6.5