New preferences: Log bots, and hide the current hour in hourly graphs

As part of our massive preferences overhaul, we added two new preferences that have been requested fairly often.

Bot logging

This is a new site (tracking) preference. We highly recommend leaving this OFF - log analyzers are the best way to look at bot activity on your site - but there are specific use cases where this may be useful. For example, if Clicky is logging significantly less traffic than another tracker you are using, bots are a likely cause so enabling this will let you see if that's the case or not.

Here's where to enable this new option: (Again, we highly recommend leaving it OFF...)



It's important to note that this is no guarantee that all bots will get logged. We'll only log bot activity if they interact with Javascript (a lot of them do these days) or load our 'noscript' backup tracking method.

We'll try our best to identify Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo bots, which you'll see under the new 'Robot' section of the web browsers and operating systems reports. All other robots will just be labeled 'Robot'. Bots will also be logged as normal visitors if this is on, so you will see them in your visitors report and you can filter visitors with the new robot user agents.

Hide current hour in hourly graphs

Near the beginning of the hour, the number for that hour (visitors, actions, whatever) might be quite small compared to a full hour. If you view your reports near the beginning of the hour, you will see this as a 'cliff' and perhaps panic that your traffic suddenly died.

We highly suggest checking the current time before panicking in such situations, but we get it that some people would prefer never to be in that situation. So now there's a new user preference to always hide the current hour.




Also released today were some new on-demand features for graphs, so be sure to check those out too and let us know what you think!