Wedge

It's not all right, however it has several interesting side effects.

Firstly, it would decrease queries on the server quite a margin (and queries that have complications, at that).

Secondly, for those folks who use Google Analytics, it would bring the number of hits reported much closer between SMF and GA, because spider hits aren't counted with GA.

What you could do is to record spider hits separately to visitor hits. You wouldn't get the saving of the first one, and the accuracy of the second would be preserved - and you'd be able to neutralise the effects of SMF users thinking they'd lost hits.

Or we could simply have an option in the admin area, disabled by default, to skip bots from these logs...
Considering that there's no 100% sure way of determining whether an IP is a bot, it'd make sense to leave it up to the admin to decide what they wanna do. But personally, I would certainly enable such an option. As long as one is aware that less hits doesn't translate to less visitors...

IIRC, when I used to use GA on noisen.com, my stats over there were MUCH lower, something like 5 times less than SMF's own account.

Separating spider hits from the rest would be suitable as long as we have an option to disable spider stat logging. But I wouldn't feel comfortable implementing that myself...

(Although I seem to remember I'd separated spiders from visitors in Noisen/Wedge.org code, but I don't remember what it was about, since the stats themselves do take bots into account...)

And by the same token, more hits doesn't mean more visitors either.Yup, that's about right.Wouldn't we put it into the spider options?

That sounds like the right way to do it, yeah. :)