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

[blind-eddie]

Ok one last request for this great hack,I can add a link to This other Great Hack ,but I would really like to add this to my 1st or 2nd navbar but I'm not exactly sure how to. I do know how to get to navbar, I see items that are in the navbar,but I dont know how to edit an existing item with proper wording to get The Spider Page to show up on 1st or 2nd navbar.......

[jw00dy]

Go to -> vBulletin Options -> Menu Control Version 1.3 Final Settings

Then add your link.

Name of menu Item: spiders
Menu link one: outerzone.us/forums/spiders.php

That's it. customize anything else you want to use.

[jw00dy]

Actually, I just looked and it looks like you figured it out.

[doopz]

I'm wondering..

Database error in vBulletin 3.5.4:

Invalid SQL:
DELETE FROM spider_watcher WHERE bot = '';show processlist;';

MySQL Error : You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ';show processlist;'' at line 1
Error Number : 1064

What exactly is this?
I don't see 'show processlist' anywhere in the php script, making me wonder it might be someone trying to exploit the script?

havnt look into it more but..

edit:
I see some entries in the mysqldatabase in the table 'bot'.

51219 ';show processlist; Unknown Spider 2006-08-16 22:33:48 1113767976 index 0
51220 ';show processlist; Unknown Spider 2006-08-16 22:33:52 1113767976 index 0
51223 ';show processlist; Unknown Spider 2006-08-16 22:34:08 1113767976 index 0
51399 ';show processlist; Unknown Spider 2006-08-16 22:54:18 1113767976 index 0
51402 ';show processlist; Unknown Spider 2006-08-16 22:54:22 1113767976 index 0
51403 ';show processlist; Unknown Spider 2006-08-16 22:54:27 1113767976 index 0
51404 ';show processlist; Unknown Spider 2006-08-16 22:54:31 1113767976 index 0
51405 ';show processlist; Unknown Spider 2006-08-16 22:54:35 1113767976 index 0
51406 ';show processlist; Unknown Spider 2006-08-16 22:54:38 1113767976 index 0
51407 ';show processlist; Unknown Spider 2006-08-16 22:54:43 1113767976 index 0
51408 ';show processlist; Unknown Spider 2006-08-16 22:54:47 1113767976 index 0
51409 ';show processlist; Unknown Spider 2006-08-16 22:54:51 1113767976 index 0

and some more nasty entry's

[Hornstar]

I have the latest one installed, and ive not had any problems with it and had it for about a week. Then I had to restart my sever today and then got this database error over and over and over hundreds of times.

Database error in vBulletin 3.6.0:

Invalid SQL:
INSERT INTO vb3_spider_watcher (nice_bot, bot, ip_address, page, type, info, timestamp) VALUES ('Unknown Spider','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6','1081014013','showthread','','', NOW());

MySQL Error  : Duplicate entry '4504085' for key 1
Error Number : 1062

Any ideas why?

[4yBak]

Some records from MySql Dump:

(118075, 'WebAlta Crawler/1.3.18 (http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaster.html) (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU)', 'Webalta Crawler', '2006-08-23 20:02:30', '1373540995', 'member', 'searchspider', 'http://www.webalta.ru/bot.html', 0),
(118076, 'WebAlta Crawler/1.3.18 (http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaster.html) (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU)', 'Webalta Crawler', '2006-08-23 20:03:13', '1373540995', 'member', 'searchspider', 'http://www.webalta.ru/bot.html', 0),
(118077, 'WebAlta Crawler/1.3.18 (http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaster.html) (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU)', 'Webalta Crawler', '2006-08-23 20:03:56', '1373540995', 'member', 'searchspider', 'http://www.webalta.ru/bot.html', 0),

My board visit crawler WebAlta (info for this crawler exist in my spiders_vbulletin.xml), in db records for this crawler exist, but this hack don't count visits of this crawler (field rolup already = 0). With other spiders I don't have this problem, only with WebAlta. Why ?

PS: I'm using version of this hack Beta 10, but when I use version beta 9 - this error still happened.

Need help!

[mikelbeck]

It's because that spider is identifying itself as "Windows NT", so the rollup process thinks it's a user and not a spider. I guess it should check to see if there's anything in the "type" field before deleting it...

I'll fix that in the next version.

[Snake]

Good to see it's working fine on 3.6. I'm on it!

[4yBak]

thx, waiting for the next version

[Snake]

So when is it gonna be released? Anytime soon?