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

[Lizard King]

Originally Posted by nitro

That would just display the block and images with no info. Guess I will have to try an find the php code in vb files and take pot luck on adding it to the spiders.php

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=104591

[nitro]

Thanks that works great best click install there aswell


Iv noticed this spider product also detects JumpD's RSS article bot as an unknown spider.

I dont mind that as it shows that bots hit counter aswell but how would I add to the spiders xml file this bot which has an ip of 0.0.0.0 and i dont think it has an agent but I maybe wrong so it shows as say Articlebot instead of unknown ?

[Zenith]

Tidy hack, thanks.

I notice that the last visited date is out though. I only installed a few minutes ago but the few spiders already listed are showing "Yesterday". Time is correct, but it should be "Today".

Clicked install...

[mikelbeck]

Version 1.0.0 Beta 3 is available.

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

Upgrade Instructions
1. Upload (and overwrite) spiders.php to the root of your forum.
2. Import the file product-spiderwatcher.xml using the Manage Products module. Make sure the "Allow Overwrite" option is set to "Yes".
3. Add a link to spiders.php on your navbar or footer.

[Zia]

Thankx Man.. for real kool support..


-Unknown Spider
Googlebot-Image/1.0 01-07-2006
01:09 AM 66.249.65.202 errordocs 2

-Unknown Spider
Mozilla/3.01 (compatible 01-07-2006
03:48 AM 69.88.30.146, 202.52.197.55, 202.52.197.56, 210.50.143.21 cron, errordocs 213

-Unknown Spider
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Google Desktop) 01-07-2006
11:55 AM 70.236.181.179 errordocs, external 7



umm one spider hit 213 times..its detected as unknown spider..
can u plz mark them?? and most of time it face errordoc..
how could we detect that..right where it face error doc?
we need to know which bot see error doc in where?


and which bot is doing harm to forum...any way to detect from the tracker page?

plz thanks...help us

[bashy]

Hi..

What i find intersting is the fact that all the spiders are showing as being online 20 hours ago...I know for a fact that most have been in all day long, they very rarely leave so how can it be saying 20hrs ago or should i say why is it saying 20 when it clearly isnt lol

Please advise?

Bashy

Spider Name (Known Spiders) Last Visit IP Address(es) Page Hits 
Google AdSense 20 Hours Ago
08:37 PM 66.249.66.102 THIS_SCRIPT, forumdisplay, index, login, member, misc, newreply, newthread, online, pager, poll, private, profile, register, search, showthread 347 
Google 20 Hours Ago
08:48 PM 66.249.66.102 index, showthread 25 
MSNBot 20 Hours Ago
04:46 PM 207.46.98.48 VBGooglemap, calendar, forumdisplay, index, jukebox, member, memberlist, search, showthread, vbradio 44 
Yahoo! Slurp 20 Hours Ago
08:10 PM 68.142.249.14, 68.142.249.160, 68.142.250.17, 68.142.251.166 forumdisplay, member, showthread 4 

Spider Name (Unknown Spiders) Last Visit IP Address(es) Page Hits 
Unknown Spider
 20 Hours Ago
08:00 PM 82.110.105.18 external 76 
Unknown Spider
FeedBurner/1.0 (http://www.FeedBurner.com) 20 Hours Ago
08:16 PM 66.150.96.109 external 30 
Unknown Spider
Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.0-rc2 20 Hours Ago
08:16 PM 206.188.0.11, 209.18.119.137, 209.18.119.138 showthread 18 
Unknown Spider
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Google Desktop) 20 Hours Ago
03:38 PM 86.142.103.72 external 5 
Unknown Spider
Yahoo-Blogs/v3.9 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearc...awling-02.html ) 20 Hours Ago
08:24 PM 209.191.83.13 showthread 47

[mikelbeck]

That is strange...

The only thing I can think is that the server time zone is set to something different from what yours is.

What the plugin does is write a record into the database, and the timestamp it uses is "NOW()", which is the current time. I think it uses the server's current time, but I'm not positive. So if the server's time is different from your time (if it's set to GMT, for example, and your time zone is GMT-4), then the times will be different.

I'll have a look to see if it can be set to the board's current time instead of using the "NOW()" function.

[bashy]

Hi mikelbeck

Cheers for the quick response...
The server is in the UK as i am therefore we are on the same timezone

Bashy

Originally Posted by mikelbeck

That is strange...

The only thing I can think is that the server time zone is set to something different from what yours is.

What the plugin does is write a record into the database, and the timestamp it uses is "NOW()", which is the current time. I think it uses the server's current time, but I'm not positive. So if the server's time is different from your time (if it's set to GMT, for example, and your time zone is GMT-4), then the times will be different.

I'll have a look to see if it can be set to the board's current time instead of using the "NOW()" function.

[mikelbeck]

Originally Posted by bashy

Hi mikelbeck

Cheers for the quick response...
The server is in the UK as i am therefore we are on the same timezone

Bashy

Can you go into your admin control panel, click on "Maintenenace", then "Diagnostics", then select "MySQL Variables" in the "System Information" box and click "Submit". What value does it show for "timezone", and what is your timezone? And also, what is your forum's timezone set to?

[bashy]

Hi m8

MySQL Variables
system_time_zone GMT

My time zone is GMT
Forum Timezone is GMT also

I dont suppose this helps you any now does it lol

Bashy