Last modified: 2008-05-09 13:08:29 UTC

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Bug 14044 - Page counts should not be incremented by pages viewed by bots
Page counts should not be incremented by pages viewed by bots
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
Parser (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Normal enhancement (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
:
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2008-05-08 14:00 UTC by Chris Forman Orth
Modified: 2008-05-09 13:08 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Chris Forman Orth 2008-05-08 14:00:54 UTC
On our site we have a google appliance indexing our wiki that logs in as user "Google" which is a member of the Bot group.  It would be nice if there were some way for us to tell MediaWiki not to count visits to pages by this user.  Otherwise even unused pages are showing up as being hit thousands of times.

We'll likely write a patch for our own setup no matter what, but if something has been done already or there is a specific way we should implement this so we could submit this patch officially please let me know.
Comment 1 Aryeh Gregor (not reading bugmail, please e-mail directly) 2008-05-08 14:03:25 UTC
If you have a patch, please attach it here.  I'll be willing to look at it and commit it if you test it and it works.  For completeness, it might also be a good idea to exclude common known web crawlers by User-Agent.
Comment 2 Leon Weber 2008-05-08 15:02:42 UTC
Fixed in SVN trunk, r34436.
Comment 3 Brion Vibber 2008-05-08 18:53:02 UTC
This behavior would be inconsistent with everything else -- other bots (such as general search spiders) will still be hitting things without any such marker, and will be counted.
Comment 4 Aryeh Gregor (not reading bugmail, please e-mail directly) 2008-05-09 13:08:29 UTC
That's what I thought at first, but I reconsidered.  It's at least closer to the "real" figure, so it's an improvement.  As I indicated in comment #1, it would also be good to exclude known web crawlers.  But if a bot is running (for whatever reason) that screen-scrapes every page once or more per day, say, that's obviously going to seriously reduce the usefulness of this count.

I do wonder about whether it's a good idea to fold this into the bot permission.  It would probably be best not to make that a grab-bag of unrelated functionality; this is why we switched from group-based to permission-based controls to begin with.  A separate permission seems better.  Maybe we should rename the 'bot' permission to 'rc-hidable' or something.

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