Tell bots apart from human visitors for stats?
- by Pekka
I am looking to roll my own simple web stats script.
The only major obstacle on the road, as far as I can see, is telling human visitors apart from bots. I would like to have a solution for that which I don't need to maintain on a regular basis (i.e. I don't want to update text files with bot-related User-agents).
Is there any open service that does that, like Akismet does for spam?
Or is there a PHP project that is dedicated to recognizing spiders and bots and provides frequent updates?
To clarify: I'm not looking to block bots. I do not need 100% watertight results. I just
want to exclude as many as I can from my stats. In
know that parsing the user-Agent is an
option but maintaining the patterns to
parse for is a lot of work. My
question is whether there is any
project or service that does that
already.
Bounty: I thought I'd push this as a reference question on the topic. The best / most original / most technically viable contribution will receive the bounty amount.
