[ic] Robots

[Ron Phipps]

Stefan Hornburg (Racke) wrote:
> 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
> 

Racke,

Do you happen to know what browser and version was installed along with 
the Ask toolbar and how the UserAgent came across that caused the 
session to be dropped?  We are seeing session dropping periodically and 
this could be the cause.

Thanks,

-- 
Ron Phipps
End Point Corporation
ron at endpoint.com