Colin Cunningham wrote: >I'm looking for additional information w/ respect to parsing the user-agent >field of the web log (IIS for now) in > (a) for identifying Operating System (and flavors) > (b) for identifying Browser type (and version) > (c) in identifying likely robots or agents > >For (a) and (b), I was wondering if the logic used by Analog is available. >(Should I just look in the Analog source code?) Furthermore, does this >follow some sort of standard format that different OS and Browsers follow >in filling the user-agent field. If so, would someone kindly give me a >pointer. A comparison of the FULLBROWSER report and the BROWSER summary report will probably tell you as much as you will ever know about this subject. Analog doesn't do anything with browser strings that isn't fairly obvious when you read the raw information as listed in FULLBROWSER. As for excluding robots, it depends on your definition of a robot. You can exclude "well behaved" robots fairly easily, but "stealth" robots raise some other questions - what do you hope to achieve by excluding the robots? If you just want to filter out agents that might be skewing your traffic numbers by requesting a lot of documents, then examine your top hosts to see if there is any unusual activity there. If you want to get more "accurate user session information", it's highly unlikely that the relatively small number of robots visiting your site will have any effect on the noise created by proxy servers and dynamic address allocation. Aengus ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is the analog-help mailing list. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" in the main BODY OF THE MESSAGE. List archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
