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 <nu...@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 <oke...@wikimedia.org> > wrote: > >> What was the motivation for this change? Just looking for possible >> automata? >> >> On 21 October 2015 at 15:38, Nuria Ruiz <nu...@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 >> > >> > >> > >> > _______________________________________________ >> > Analytics mailing list >> > Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org >> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics >> > >> >> >> >> -- >> Oliver Keyes >> Count Logula >> Wikimedia Foundation >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Analytics mailing list >> Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics >> > > > _______________________________________________ > Analytics mailing list > Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics > >
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