[thelist] Logging stats - excluding robots?

[Ian Anderson]

Ian Anderson wrote:

> If a given robot does not support cookies and IIS starts a new session 
> for every GET request, the figure returned for "Sessions" could be 
> vastly inaccurate if, for example, half the visits are by robots and 
> each file requested started a new session.

Follow up - have just turned cookies off in Firefox and tested some of 
the issue, and it looks like:

Answer to my Q 2.
Yes, IIS fires Session_onStart for every page request made without 
cookies, starting a new session each time an ASP page is requested.

Answer to my Q3.
It doesn't start a new session when an image is requested, though. So 
the scale of the inaccuracy is driven by the number of ASP pages visited 
by the cookieless User Agent.

e.g. (asssuming robots can't accept cookies)

10 human visitors - 10 sessions
10 robots, 5 pages - 50 sessions

Site stats report 60 visits instead of 10.

Short of munged URLs with home-rolled session tracking, any thoughts?

Cheers

Ian



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