I was under the impression that most of the MediaWiki bot frameworks do
accept cookies, but I imagine many of the home-made bots don't. Seems like
using an unknown useragent string might be a better proxy.
On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 1:49 PM, Nuria Ruiz <nuria(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
What was the
motivation for this change? Just looking for possible
automata?
Right.The motivation was to see if the absence of cookies works as a cheap
proxy to identify robots. It is a pretty easy change to make that might
help us quite a bit, we shall update the list when we have some data.
On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 12:47 PM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
What was the motivation for this change? Just
looking for possible
automata?
On 21 October 2015 at 15:38, Nuria Ruiz <nuria(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Team:
As of today incoming request data includes an extra bit of information
on
the X-analytics header.
If an incoming request to any wikipedia project had no cookies
whatsoever it
will be tagged with nocookie=1. A requests
without any cookies could
correspond to a fresh browser session, a user browsing with cookies
disabled
or, most likely, a bot request as most bots will
not accept cookies. We
*might* be able to use this setting as a cheap proxy to quantify bot
traffic.
Documentation about this change can be found here:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/X-Analytics
Thanks,
Nuria
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Count Logula
Wikimedia Foundation
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