AppleWebKit - Preventing "Users Online" numbers skew?

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AndyAero95
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AppleWebKit - Preventing "Users Online" numbers skew?

Post by 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).
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Brf
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Re: AppleWebKit - Preventing "Users Online" numbers skew?

Post by Brf »

That is part of the user agent used by Chrome.
AndyAero95
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Re: AppleWebKit - Preventing "Users Online" numbers skew?

Post by AndyAero95 »

Brf wrote: Fri Oct 11, 2024 6:51 pm 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 :lol:

Is there any way to prevent it skewing the "users online" count, without detrimental results to access etc.?
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Brf
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Re: AppleWebKit - Preventing "Users Online" numbers skew?

Post by 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
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thecoalman
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Re: AppleWebKit - Preventing "Users Online" numbers skew?

Post by 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.
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