[interchange-bugs] [rt.icdevgroup.org #330] Robots

Tue Nov 17 12:44:09 UTC 2009

Tue Nov 17 12:44:09 2009: Request 330 was acted upon.
Transaction: Ticket created by racke
       Queue: Interchange
     Subject: Robots
       Owner: Nobody
  Requestors: racke at linuxia.de
      Status: new
 Ticket <URL: http://rt.icdevgroup.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=330 >

Hello, Interchange enthusiasts!

Today I got a report about a customer who wasn't able to order in an
Interchange store.

It turned out that the user had the Ask toolbar installed and the robots.cfg
wasn't up-to-date, so the session was dropped.

You probably agree with me that preventing orders is really a
bad thing.

Recognition of robots by examining the UserAgent string is of course error
prone and false positives are possible.

Robots who successfully login to an Interchange store are unlikely to exist.
In this case Interchange should loudly scream into the logfiles about that
and leave an useful error message for the user.

Also Kevin Walsh used to manage the default settings in robots.cfg, but he
is not available anymore. Anyone else who would manage this task?

Regards
          Racke

-- 
LinuXia Systems => http://www.linuxia.de/
Expert Interchange Consulting and System Administration
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Interchange Development Team