AppleWebKit - Preventing "Users Online" numbers skew?

[AndyAero95]

Is there a way to prevent AppleWebKit/537.36 from skewing the users online count number?

I previously assumed it was a Bot/Crawler/etc., yet assigning it as a Bot resulted in a complete inability for anyone to access the forum, as their browser was not being authenticated (IIRC).

[Brf]

That is part of the user agent used by Chrome.

[AndyAero95]

That is part of the user agent used by Chrome.

I realise that now, following my previous faux-pas with assigning the URL as a Bot, and creating catastrophic results

Is there any way to prevent it skewing the "users online" count, without detrimental results to access etc.?

[Brf]

But "it" in this case is your regular users. If you are trying to identify a bot, you would have to use a different identifying word, other than "AppleWebKit". My user agent looks like
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
You would have to identify a word that is not in that string

[thecoalman]

The short answer is no. It's either a legitimate user or a bot spoofing the user agent. If it's a bot you need to block them from accessing the site to begin with. Generally speaking this can only be accomplished using a service like Cloudflare.