Ignoring robots and spammers

Hi saltpit,

unfortunately some bots present themselves as ‘real’ visitors, and as you may understand there’s really no reliable way to say who’s on the other side, if a person or an automated system, other than what the visitor tells WP SlimStat. Most bots (Google and other major search engines) are of course honest enough, and don’t disguise themselves as humans, but some other sneaky dudes do ??

One feature that I plan to add to SlimStat is to use a full client-side tracking engine (a-là Google Analytics or JetPack). This should further improve the capability of ignoring bots and spammers, since most of them are not capable of executing that code like regular browsers do.

For now you’ll have to be patient and tolerate the fact that some bots sneak in once in a while.

As for your other question, yes, you are correct.

Thank you,
Camu

Hi camu,

thanks for your explanation. I now better understand that it’s difficult to identify the “real” visitors, and if I get it right most of the “faked” visitor are ignored with my settings already. But that doesn’t explain the calculation of the stats further on. To make this clear here’s a screenshot of my first visitor:

https://img12.imageshack.us/img12/1412/visitorstab.png

As you can see the data of two visitors is shown in the boxes below the graph and the summary, which are both counting just one. So I would expect that the second visitor is eather shown in the graph or that his data is not used for further calculations.

As presented now I can’t see what’s the entirety of visitors the detailed data is referring to. Or did I get something wrong?

Greets,
saltpit

Hi there,

please refer to the HELP tab to get more information about what all the different terms mean. A visit is a session of at least 30 minutes which tracks what a given (human) visitor access on your site. So one visit can include one or more pageviews. Visits are tracked through COOKIES, assigned to your (human) visitors.

Bots usually don’t handle COOKIES, so no visit ID can be assigned to them. But if they disguise themselves as ‘regular’ browsers (let’s say, Firefox on Linux, instead of SuperBot Crawler), WP SlimStat won’t be able to ignore their pageviews.

Long story short: you see 1 visit coming from your only human visitor, but multiple pageviews generated both by your human visitor and those sneaky bots.

Does it make sense?

Camu

First of all: thanks for the tip with the HELP tab – that opens new horizons for me! I never realized that this tab can be edited by plugin programmers and thought it to be just a WP help.

On the issue: Yes, that makes absolutely sense and I understand where the differences come from. But unfortunately ist doesn’t make the data more transparent. So please consider this as a feature request:

IMHO the data of pageviews without visit ID should not be used for the stats at all. Then my first visitor would have made 100% in every category an everything would be correct, right? Or there should be a message saying of how many pageviews the values are calculated.

Greets,
saltpit

You make a very good point, that can be ‘easily’ done by ‘forcing’ WP SlimStat to apply a filter where visit_id is greater than zero to all the stats it displays. You can do that manually for now.

BTW, I am working on implementing this new feature to make WP SlimStat compatible with W3TC and friends, which has the nice side effect of ignoring bots and spammers, like I said before. If you want, you can contact me at

https://www.duechiacchiere.it/contatto

so that I can send you the beta as soon as it’s ready ??

Thanks,
Camu

Thanks, that sounds good. As for me the workaround setting a filter is fine till your update is ready. But if you want me to test it, feel free to send it to me. You’ve just got my mail address through your contact form.

Greets,
saltpit

I got your email. I’ll be in touch soon. Thanks.

Cheers,
Camu