spiders

[scragar]

how did PHP know that it was the ask jeeves spider on a little while ago and not a guest? My image quality leave much to be desired, but it was either this or nothing...

http://img154.echo.cx/img154/6360/howdidyou4vf.gif

[the tree]

The ask jeeves spider always has the same ip address, simple as.

[scragar]

I should have guessed that.

I though it would have been something complexe so I never though of thinking about the IP.

[JPnyc]

In "currently active users" there's a dropdown from which you can select "search-bots". That just shows the bots on the site.

[scragar]

In "currently active users" there's a dropdown from which you can select "search-bots". That just shows the bots on the site.
I spend so long each day glancing through that(so I know if someones replying to a thread I'm waiting for a reply from ect.) and yet I only just noticed that.

how could you figgure out the IP of ask jeeves anyway? It's not like you can ask it to log in or anything.

[JPnyc]

Don't need it to log in. IPs of guests can be read by the forum software, provided it's set to do so.

[AdamGundry]

I would imagine this is actually determined by the User-Agent HTTP header rather than the IP address. Bots such as the Googlebot and the Teoma crawler may be running on many computers at once, with many IP addresses, but they should provide a unique user agent string to allow themselves to be identified. In Ask's case, this is "User-Agent: Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma)" (see this page (http://sp.ask.com/docs/about/tech_crawling.html) for more details).

Adam

[PeOfEo]

also if you look at the host name you can tell it is ask jeeves.