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Breaking Down Guest Views to Find Bots

Branwyn T

As promised, here's information on finding out which of your guest views are actually bots!

You'll visit the APIv2 page on your dashboard, as shown here:

Here's the request body to use - just changed the dates for the period of time you're looking for:

{

  "collection": "page",

  "start": "2023-01-01",

  "end": "2023-01-31",

  "group": "userAgentParsed.browser.family",

  "type": "count",

  "filters" : [

    {
    "prop": "user.roleType",

    "op": "eq",

    "val": "guest"

    }

  ]

}

To break this down a bit, we're looking at the page (views) collection for the range of time between the start and end dates. We're grouping that by browser family and getting a count. We then filter for role type equals guest.

This returns an easy-to-read bit of JSON, that looks something like this:

Now you can determine whether those spikes in guest views represent people or bots!

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Comments

cappylassen

Is it certain that only bot activity is returned when user role = guest?

What about visitors that land on the site that are in incognito mode or not logged in. What user role would they fall into?

BrendanP

https://success.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/5810#Comment_5810

@cappylassen They would fall into Guest. Any non-logged-in user is considered part of the 'Guest' user role.

@Branwyn T was just explaining how you could further break out what Guest role views are caused by Bots using the API to drill down further.

Rav Singh

Hi @Branwyn T, thanks so much for this! 🙌

I gave this a whirl yesterday and it worked perfectly. Was actually quite eye-opening to see how many views are coming from bots! 🤖

Question.. is there any way to identify how many views are from bots on a selected discussion? ie. We have a few discussions that rank consistently in our top 10 viewed every month but they're over 4-5 years old, no recent interaction in new terms of comments and are pretty specific in their content.
I'm getting the sense these aren't 'legitimate' views and would be keen to see if they're bot views.

Branwyn T

Heyo @cappylassen,

In fact, if you look at the data this call returns, you'll see that many of the views come from actual browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox iOS, Mobile Safari, etc.

Heyo @Rav Singh,

Thanks for being patient with me as I pondered this! My gut tells me this should be possible, but you might need to make multiple calls.

I think if you get a list of discussionIDs you could iterate through that list making the above call with an additional filter for "discussion.discussionID" "eq" "{discussionID}".

I have some other fancy tricks for looking at the calls made by our OOTB charts, so I'll try and share that before too much more time passes (which would help with the getting a list of discussionsIDs).

Shauna

@Rav Singh — check out this discussion as well (especially the last two comments 🤓)

https://success.vanillaforums.com/discussion/1658/ever-get-a-huge-spike-in-visits-but-have-no-clue-why

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