How many guests are bots in XenForo? How reliable is the XF statistics?

[Jason76]

I'm wondering cause misleading stuff here could be very disappointing, damaging. Also, I've noticed there isn't any robots count on the front page stuff. Why was it removed and is the list somewhere else?

 

[Carlos X]

I'm wondering cause misleading stuff here could be very disappointing, damaging. Also, I've noticed there isn't any robots count on the front page stuff. Why was it removed and is the list somewhere else?

What are you talking about? *scratches head*

How is it damaging?

Which front page?

 

[Jason76]

I mean any typical xenforo forum. Are the guests on there real or bots?

 

[Carlos X]

I mean any typical xenforo forum. Are the guests on there real or bots?

Yes, and no. You really can't see if they're real or not, the way to know if there's users in there, is through Google Analytics. It will tell you everything about your user's behaviors. Most of them are guests, but you can't tell if its a bot or not because xenForo can't recognize bots like they can with Google, Bing, Facebook, Yandex, etc. It shows you crawler bots, but something like xrumer can't be seen. If you really, really want legitimate users, you will have to raise your site's pagerank. (Yes, that still exists no matter how many updates Google makes, or insistence they make.) So, just roll with the punches, and rank your site.

It is reliable, but it depends on what's going on - on the other side of that window.

 

[Jason76]

I mean any typical xenforo forum. Are the guests on there real or bots?

Yes, and no. You really can't see if they're real or not, the way to know if there's users in there, is through Google Analytics. It will tell you everything about your user's behaviors. Most of them are guests, but you can't tell if its a bot or not because xenForo can't recognize bots like they can with Google, Bing, Facebook, Yandex, etc. It shows you crawler bots, but something like xrumer can't be seen. If you really, really want legitimate users, you will have to raise your site's pagerank. (Yes, that still exists no matter how many updates Google makes, or insistence they make.) So, just roll with the punches, and rank your site.

It is reliable, but it depends on what's going on - on the other side of that window.

My pagerank is probably 4. Domain authority is 48. Trust flow is only 3, though.

 

[Jordan]

For the most part, you can see bots via this:

The same would be on any other xenforo forum too on the sidebar.

If they have the sidebar or the statistics disabled, you can always go to /online/ to see all members, guests, and robots currently visiting the site.
For forum promotion it's here:
https://forumpromotion.net/online/

Now, this obv won't be able to detect all robots, perhaps such as some spam bots but there's a general idea.

Also, this is a good resource for XenForo members to get better google analytics: (Currently only for XenForo 1.x. XF 2.0 is in developments)
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/better-analytics.2288/

 

[Azareal]

Classic forum statistics will always have trouble with it, but quite a lot of bots are spottable with the right tools, although not all.

For one, the bots which pour in from FP tend to have Linux in their user agents (while there are some Linux lovers out there, 90% of the world runs Windows) and another way is to see if they have a referer header and to scrutinise specifically which site they're coming from.

Also, a friend of mine who runs a really big site told me the other week or so that half of their analytics went dark because of Adblockers starting to block Google Analytics and that they had to roll their own analytics.