[ic] question regarding entry in usertrack log

[John Young]

Christopher Wenham wrote:
> On Friday 30 April 2004 01:07, John Young wrote:
> 
>>What was the corresponding User Agent string from your web server
>>access log?  Mine contained AskBar (the 'Ask' is what made it 'nsession').
>>
>>Anyone know if AskBar can cause that behavior, or whether or not
>>AskBar in the UA should trigger no session, for that matter?
> 
> 
>  It's matching against "Ask" in interchange.cfg's RobotUA section, so 
> Interchange thinks it's a bot. I don't know what AskBar is yet, but I 
> recently had to remove "Ask" from the RobotUA list because a customer wasn't 
> able to check out -- without a session they couldn't put anything in their 
> cart or log in to their account.


I believe this is AskBar:  http://www.askbar.com/about.cfm

I poorly worded my last question above -- was essentially asking
if anyone thought that Ask should remain in RobotUA.  I'm following
your answer anyway, for now, and removing it.  Thanks for mentioning
your experience, Chris.

Along those same lines, I have removed spider*.proxy.aol.com from
RobotHost.  I'm hoping RobotUA will keep any actual AOL spiders
known as such; however, I was seeing normal user sessions sometimes
using spider*.proxy.aol.com as caching/proxy servers.  A single
visitor's traffic would look something like:

20031215	WYdRD8dV:aol.com	cache-mtc-ah05.proxy.aol.com
20031215	WYdRD8dV:aol.com	cache-mtc-ak02.proxy.aol.com
20031215	WYdRD8dV:aol.com	cache-mtc-ab01.proxy.aol.com
20031215	nsession:aol.com	spider-ntc-td062.proxy.aol.com
20031215	WYdRD8dV:aol.com	cache-ntc-ad06.proxy.aol.com
20031215	WYdRD8dV:aol.com	cache-ntc-aa07.proxy.aol.com

It was somewhat rare, and it looks like it would usually return to the
correct session (I'm guessing due to me including the session id in
hidden CGI variables)... but I removed it from RobotHost anyway to see
what happens.


John Young