Roland and I were corresponding last night off-list.

After I apologized to him of course, for taking over the thread that he
started :-)

Among some other ideas, I suggested the following:

----------
Using the <@CGIPARAM USER_AGENT> Metatag, you could identify when a
SearchBot has just hit your site. I've noticed in my server logs that most
every SearchBot has some unique UserAgent string that is not impossible to
identify.

Once you've identified a SearchBot, then you could assign a special variable
that then hides all your <@USERREFERENCEARGUMENT> Metatags, like so:

<a href="<@APPFILE>?<@IFEMPTY <@VAR
local$ImABot>><@USERREFERENCEARGUMENT></@IF>">A link</a>

Then the _UserReference value never gets captured to begin with.

----------

At the top of your TAFs, like in a common TCF, you would need some logic
that parses for Bots.

Here are some bot agents I got from last night's log:

FAST-WebCrawler/3.7/FirstPage (atw-crawler at fast dot
no;http://fast.no/support/crawler.asp)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; grub-client-1.3.7; Crawl your own stuff with
http://grub.org)
Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma)
Mozilla/4.0 compatible ZyBorg/1.0 DLC ([EMAIL PROTECTED];
http://www.WISEnutbot.com)
Zeus 2.6
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

>From the above we can get some keywords like: 

FAST-WebCrawler
grub-client
Ask Jeeves/Teoma
www.WISEnutbot.com
Zeus 2.6
Googlebot/2.1

Then we stored the keywords in an Array (Domain or Custom Scope), then we
could loop on these keyword like:

<@ROWS ARRAY=BotScope$Bots>
<@IF EXPR="<@CGIPARAM USER_AGENT> contains '<@VAR BotScope$Bots[1,1]>'">
        <@ASSIGN local$ImABot VALUE="1">
</@IF
</@ROWS>

The trick is that you couldn't store this Variable in User Scope - because
remember you are not supplying <@UserReferenceArgument> and Bot clients
don't typically accept cookies (session or otherwise).

This new scrap of code could also easily be wrapped in a Custom Metatag, and
then we have <@URA2> or something nice and short like that.

Yes, it seems like a lot of work at first, but a global search-and-replace
with a tool like http://www.vknoware.com/afr/index.htm makes things a lot
easier.

Just an idea. Now I'll say no more on the subject :-)

Cheers.....

Scott Cadillac,
Witango.org - http://witango.org
403-281-6090 - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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