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Are bots and spiders excluded from form views data?

Gravity Support Forums » General » Feature Requests

  1. Suzanne
    Member

    My client is asking me why his form views are so high. We load a form in the sidebar on every page of his site so we expect a form view for every page hit, but he's had 15 site visitors since we cleared his view data and there have been over 600 form views. That would mean each of those 15 people hit over 40 pages which just is not possible. He's asking me if GF is differentiating between real visitors and bots from search engines.

    Posted 11 years ago on Wednesday September 12, 2012 | Permalink

  2. Chris Hajer
    Key Master

    Gravity Forms does not exclude bot and spider traffic from form views.

    Posted 11 years ago on Friday September 14, 2012 | Permalink

  3. Suzanne
    Member

    Thanks for the info Chris. Good to know. Was there a reason for leaving a bot view in the data? Or is this maybe something to request for an update?

    Posted 11 years ago on Tuesday September 18, 2012 | Permalink

  4. Chris Hajer
    Key Master

    We can move it to feature requests. I'm not sure of the reason, although maintaining a list of bots and spiders to exclude could be a full time job. The views in the form entry view are not a truly accurate metric. For tracking views and conversions you should use a dedicated service, like Google Analytics or equivalent.

    Posted 11 years ago on Tuesday September 18, 2012 | Permalink

  5. GlennSibley
    Member

    Dear Suzanne -

    I am not positive what bots are giving you problems, but this happens to many FORM fields by nasty spammer bots * spiders, etc. One of the best ways to combat this on many of our clients sites is to use your HTACCESS to block the nasty unconfirmed bots from exploring your forms and site in general. While we do also write specific Blacklists, one of my favorite I tell people to use it the 5G Blacklist. Below - I have added a sample TXT we suggest to our clients it also has a special WordPress related module in it.
    http://pastie.org/pastes/4780931/text

    I hope it helps, it should! :)

    Posted 11 years ago on Saturday September 22, 2012 | Permalink

  6. Mochajen
    Member

    Is there any way to exclude the views of the logged in admin or of our i.p. address to make sure our own traffic is excluded?

    Posted 11 years ago on Thursday March 7, 2013 | Permalink

  7. David Peralty

    There is no exclusion system for form views yet. It is on our list of future features.

    Posted 11 years ago on Thursday March 7, 2013 | Permalink