Store live and desperate. SIDS problem

[Guest]

I am still have major problems with osCsid showing in all my links from the search engines and bots. Msnbot is going through my site right now and it is getting everything with a osCsid attached to it. I have the robots.txt file set up for certain pages, but it is still getting every product and putting the osCsid on it.

 

PLEASE, how do I stop this? I have had many visitors come to my store via a link with the osCsid attached and get an error. They then leave. I've lost many customers like this. I read on the forum that the newer version of Osc came with the sid killer thing. I cannot find any other information about it.

 

I have the Prevent Spider Sessions set to True. These are my settings.

 

Title Value Action

Session Directory my/dir

Force Cookie Use False

Check SSL Session ID False

Check User Agent False

Check IP Address False

Prevent Spider Sessions True

Recreate Session True

Session Directory

 

Please can somebody help me?

Thanks so much

[peterr]

Hi,

 

For a start do you have this line in ../spiders.txt

 

msnbot

 

Must be in lowercase.

 

Peter

[Guest]

What do you mean? spiders.txt?

[Guest]

Katlyn,

look in file manager under catalog/includes/ and you should see a spider.txt file. open this file and see if msnbot is listed. On the list you have, mine are set as such and I have no problems.

 

Session Directory /tmp

Force Cookie Use true

Check SSL Session ID true

Check User Agent true

Check IP Address true

Prevent Spider Sessions True

Recreate Session True

 

I hope this helps you. Lisa

[Guest]

Hi Lisa,

 

Thanks so much for your reply.

 

I found the file and added msnbot. Is there a list somewhere of the bots so I can add the missing ones? If so, what would the list be called?

 

Any ideas on how to stop the osCsids from going onto the links for the bots AND into the other search engines? Seems that there are a lot out there and customers always get errors when they click the link. I can't figure it out.

 

When I change the setting you gave, I gets errors and can't add to cart or checkout. This makes no sense to me.

 

Help?

[peterr]

Hi,

 

I found the file and added msnbot. Is there a list somewhere of the bots so I can add the missing ones? If so, what would the list be called?

 

There was a fairly lengthy discussion on the file 'spiders.txt' just recently, I don't have the thread, simply do a search in all forums for the string "spiders.txt" (without the quotes), and go to the topic that has the most posts.

 

Be careful not to overdo the file though, some people have this:

 

googlebot

googlebot/1.0

 

which is a waste on resources, considering everytime a visitor to your site clicks on any link, the code to parse through spiders.txt will have to be executed. Because the osC code, to check on agent name against the file spiders.txt is a generic/partial search string function, you only need (using googlebot as an example) this:

 

googlebot

 

In fact, you could have this:

 

goo

 

OR

 

bot (this would match true for many).

 

I think you get the picture now. :)

 

Peter

[Guest]

Hi Peter,

 

Is there an easier way to search the forum? The + feature doesn't seem to work and putting quotes doesn't work. I can't seem to find very much about the subject.

 

Do I have to have User Agent set to True? I added the msnbot and slurp to the file, but this one just won't stop or go away. It keeps getting links with the osCsid. I noticed that it's trying to get links that no longer exist. Eg: catalog/index.php. I moved everything up one level and removed catalog, but it's getting that link somewhere. I've done a global search and do not find it anywhere, not even in cache.

 

I'm confused about this whole thing.

 

Thanks so much for your help, Peter.