Facebook Crawls all.

ok... question then.
I am i to take this to mean that either
A:You Allow Facebook to Crawl the contributor's Forum.
B. Facebook is in error and not getting removed from that list.
and that
C. it appearing as up to 10 active users simultaneously is normal?
Just seeking a bit of understanding, as FB crawls things it should not on my live site by my logs and eyes.

There's an explicit setting to control Facebook's "bot" group. Search "facebook" in the ACP.

That said, we discovered a bug related to this while reviewing the code - the setting is a multiselect, but we're doing this on the backend (treating it as a single value):

$group = ( ipsRegistry::$settings['fbc_bot_group'] ) ? $cache[ intval( ipsRegistry::$settings['fbc_bot_group'] ) ] : $group;

I'm not sure if this setting is found elsewhere. Matt, was this supposed to be a multiselect or a single value dropdown?

I confirm Facebook is crawling places it shouldn't. It crawls protected areas in my forum as well.

I guess what happens is that Facebook gets the URL of the page from the like buttons and then automatically sends out a crawler. Since the crawler is a guest it will just receive a permission denied page, but apparently IP.Board still shows him in the online list as visiting the protected area.

This is not a bug.

Any place that you have the Share Trip enabled shows the Facebook Like button. That Like button is loaded and makes a call to facebook.com basically saying "Hey Facebook here's this page!"

Facebook then tries to crawl the page. It will show in the online user list but it is important to understand it is not actually seeing the content of protected areas. It is simply getting a permission denied message (unless of course you have set it otherwise in the AdminCP).

This is not a bug.Any place that you have the Share Trip enabled shows the Facebook Like button. That Like button is loaded and makes a call to facebook.com basically saying "Hey Facebook here's this page!"Facebook then tries to crawl the page. It will show in the online user list but it is important to understand it is not actually seeing the content of protected areas. It is simply getting a permission denied message (unless of course you have set it otherwise in the AdminCP).

IIRC In earlier versions, the share/like button was hidden in a topic, if guests didn't have permission to see it.

Have same issue as well.. it's browsing private section areas on our forums too.

It should be a single value. Facebook may be throwing a crawl ping to that URL but it doesn't mean that it'll gather any data. It'll just see the 'permission denied' error.

Matt: in the past we used to hide "in_error" sessions but probably with the new sessions API we're not doing it anymore. Leave this to me I'll double check it tomorrow and update the setting to a simple dropdown too.

I've added an in_error check in the global session_api with an option to disable it, however, the call itself to getUsersIn() was already passing "in_error=0" so it seems the facebook crawler session is not properly getting updated to "in_error=1" if it can't access the topic/forum. Passing it back to you for that Matt.


P.S.: I've fixed the multiselect => dropdown too.

This bug is still happening on our board.... do I need to apply any skin changes ?

No, the fix was only in the PHP code as far as I recall, if you're still seeing this on 3.3.2 submit a ticket so we can investigate further please

I've disabled all the social media links on my board 3.1.1 and while this stopped FB for a couple of days its back again!