number of downloads - not by bots

[Cheshire]

Hey there,

every resource has a download count, but seeing the number of bots always on the site I assume a lot of the downloading is by bots. Is there a way to see the amount of downloads by actual interested people?

thanks!

 

[Ralle]

Impossible to know for sure. But good bots know not to follow links marked as rel="nofollow".

 

[Cheshire]

ok, I don't really get how bots work and if they try to download things or not, or their relationship with html stuff. I just assumed that if you know which accounts currently using the hive are bots - that means you have a way to identify them. But basically you are saying that the downloaders should pretty much be real people. cool.

 

[Ralle]

Yeah ideally. I mean I cannot be certain, but the web standards dictate that bots must not follow the links when I set those properties on the links. But it's actually a good idea to hook into the forum system's bot detection and try to filter out potential false positives.

EDIT: I will roll up an update to this soon. Thanks for the tip <3

 

[pyf]

Aren't they nothing but web crawlers that index stuff?

 

[Ralle]

Sure but there are good bots and there are bad bots. Google probably has some of the more polite and respectful bots.