Hello again,

Thanks for the link, which is very instructive indeed.

As I understand it, Google aims to prevent click abuse, and uses their own algorithm to sort the "valid" from the "invalid" clicks. It a visitor takes sudden interest in a site and visits many pages in a short period of time, the algorithm might decide that this constitutes abuse, and (retroactively) ignore clicks issued from this visitor.

We have such a user who apparently has been "crawling" our site in a very unefficient manner, increasing our page count artificially (which is annoying). This is likely the reason for XOOPS having a significantly higher page count than Adsense.

What's disturbing is that such artificial access to our pages might trigger Google's algorithm to pull the plug on us, should a specific engine or an actual user decide to click on every Adsense ad.

Therefore the truly xoops-related question is the following:

Is there an easy way for XOOPS to block display of banners on specific IPs?

or

Would you consider a visitor using a poorly-written spider that generates artificial page counts as impolite, and shut him out entirely using the existing IP ban list in the Preferences section?

If anyone has already implemented a per-IP banner ban, holler. Otherwise I'm willing to look into this myself when I have some time.

Thanks again, MadFish. I like your obnoxious avatar .

Best,
Eric

P.S. I don't mean to start a discussion on the Google issue here at xoops. I just noted that there was a discrepancy and wondered whether other XOOPS users had had the same experience. Discussion about moral or legal aspects should probably be carried out as a comment to the above-referred excellent article.

Well there's an issue with banners.

We've recently activated Google Adsense on our XOOPS site, and it turns out the banner count for the ads runs to approximately twice the number shown in our Adsense account.

Moreover, Adsense uses JavaScript in their banners, which prevents the click count from updating (it stays blocked at 0 in xoops).

Has anyone else experienced discrepancies in banner count?

Eric Vautier

Hello folks,

Just wrote a little hack of backend.php to handle custom parameters.

It requires turning the cache off, i.e. commenting out the lines:

Everything seems to work fine, at least according to the few load tests I conducted.

The question is simple: is it safe to turn off the template cache in backend.php? Did XOOPS developers have considerations other than those of performance when they decided on this caching?

Eric