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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat Jun 25, 2016 11:06 am

Last week I tried to remove Bots from the Views count on forum. I did not want to block bots - some of them serve great value to getting the pages indexed on search engines used globally.

And, I succeeded in removing bots from Views. For what it is worth, Google Analytics ignores bot traffic by default (which is the way it should be). On the forum, bots had a tendency to over-inflate traffic figures, which I found to be annoying.

However, what I didn't realize I had done in the process was block all views by users who weren't logged into the site. So all Guest traffic - and there has been a lot - wasn't being added to the Views scores, wherever you see those. As a result it made the site seem quite dead to outsiders any time a new topic was posted. Oops!

For now, that work has been undone and bots are back. But so are Guests!





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