[thelist] Logging stats - excluding robots?

[David Kaufman]

Hi Ian,

Ian Anderson <ian at zstudio.co.uk> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I am writing a simple stats logging feature for a Classic ASP web
> application, and I would like to exclude robots from the results so as
> to produce a more  accurate figure for visits by humans.

Why re-invent this wheel?  Seperating the robots from the true visitors 
is a problem that's already been solved, and the solutions are quite 
well tested and actively maintained (even for IIS!) thanks to open 
source developers and a wide variety of users.

Try http://www.awstats.org/

AWStats is so good at sepeating robots from true visitors, that one 
client of mine doesn't want to switch to it, because their historical 
WebTrends reports show such an inflated visitor count that they're 
afraid their bosses will think that the site suddenly became less 
popular:
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/awstats_faq.html#DIFFERENT_RESULTS

-dave