Identifying crawlers

registered · Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6437

While working on nukeWYSIWYG, I received a great suggestion from Guardian to disable the editor for crawlers to save bandwidth. I quickly considered an approach of identifying crawlers by using the PHP get_browser function:

Code:

   if (get_cfg_var('browscap')) {


      $browser=get_browser();


   }


   if ($advanced_editor == 0 or $browser->crawler) {


      # use regular textarea


   } else {


      # use WYSIWYG editor


   }

But not all hosts maintain the browscap.ini file or allow its use. And using the get_browser function can be expensive, so I'm told. Assuming crawlers don't accept cookies, wouldn't this approach might achieve the desired results?

Code:

   if ($advanced_editor == 0 or !isset($_COOKIE)) {


      # use regular textarea


   } else {


      # use WYSIWYG editor


   }

Sells PC To Pay For Divorce Joined: Posts: 5661

nice discussion here..
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/archive/index.php/identifying-crawlers-avoiding-sessions/t-11763.html

Posted: Sun Jan 01, 2006 7:24 pm

Thanks, hitwalker, I saw that. It's a slightly different issue, but that gave me the idea to check for cookies. I'd like to know if anyone sees a problem with that approach.