Programmatic Bot Detection
- by matt
Hi, I need to write some code to analyze whether or not a given user on our site is a bot. If it's a bot, we'll take some specific action. Looking at the User Agent is not something that is successful for anything but friendly bots, as you can specify any user agent you want in a bot. I'm after behaviors of unfriendly bots. Various ideas I've had so far are:
If you don't have a browser ID
If you don't have a session ID
Unable to write a cookie
Obviously, there are some cases where a legitimate user will look like a bot, but that's ok. Are there other programmatic ways to detect a bot, or either detect something that looks like a bot? thanks!