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

It's still working, I just got the two emails about it. I allowed overwrite as well. Reinstall gives me the same thing.

It's not a big issue, since it's still working, just figured it was worth mentioning.

[Zia]

yeah micklebeck...

its sober & nice upgrade..least it makes the makes page miles long

my warm wishes to u

btw do u have time to modify robots list...hence theres no one taking care of robots list... ?

[993ti]

Omg, look at Gigabot and Yahoo
http://www.twenteracingscene.com/spiders.php
Is that normal?

[mikelbeck]

Originally Posted by 993ti

Omg, look at Gigabot and Yahoo
http://www.twenteracingscene.com/spiders.php
Is that normal?

Yeah, they do a lot of that. Have a look at what they've done to one of my sites: http://www.happyhourpub.com/spiders.php.

Check out MSNbot, too, over 37K hits.

[Megareus Rex]

Uhh, a weird occurence:

When I first clicked on it a few minutes ago (after upgrading yesterday), it said Yahoo! Slurp had 390 IPs. I clicked on the link to display them, and it didn't open. I went and re-accessed the page, and it was down to 22. Now, every time I access spiders.php, the # of IPs for Y! Slurp goes down by 1.

Just an odd occurence...

PS: http://www.evermoreforums.com/forums/spiders.php if you wanna see

[Brandon Sheley]

upgraded and all seems fine..

thx for the update

btw, I like the popup for the ip's..
much cleaner..

[mikelbeck]

Originally Posted by Megareus Rex

Uhh, a weird occurence:

When I first clicked on it a few minutes ago (after upgrading yesterday), it said Yahoo! Slurp had 390 IPs. I clicked on the link to display them, and it didn't open. I went and re-accessed the page, and it was down to 22. Now, every time I access spiders.php, the # of IPs for Y! Slurp goes down by 1.

Just an odd occurence...

PS: http://www.evermoreforums.com/forums/spiders.php if you wanna see

Yeah, I see that happening too.

It'll be fixed in the next version...

[funinthesun]

I've just installed this and got this error:

Database error in vBulletin 3.5.3:

Invalid SQL:
START TRANSACTION;

MySQL Error  : You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'START TRANSACTION' at line 1
Error Number : 1064
Date         : Friday, February 24th 2006 @ 06:33:48 PM
Script       : http://www.********.com/spiders.php
Referrer     : 
IP Address   : **.**.***.***
Username     : *****
Classname    : vb_database

I've also just read through 16 pages on this thread so not to bother you if the problem had already been solved with someone else but the two times that it's mentioned nobody has replied with a solution. So what I'm asking nicely is... can somebody help me please :nervous:

[Robbed]

I just got the same error, any fix?

[Robbed]

I figured it out, It's most likely because we are using sql version lower then 4.0. Start Transaction is only used in 4 and higher.

I opened up spiders.php line 47

replaced

$cleanup_data = $db->query_first("START TRANSACTION");

with

$cleanup_data = $db->query_first("BEGIN");

so far it's working.