Feature request: Filter traffic feed by bot/human

Hi Brandon,

Thanks for your message and suggestion.

The issue with this sort of labelling is that it can be easily misunderstood and it’s not as trivial to identify a bot as it may first appear – this is the major challenge we try to overcome.

Malicious bots can “pretend” to be human visitors and disguise themselves in a very trivial manner. Labelling this as “not a bot” can be easily, and for many bots, altogether wrong.

Disguised bots can be identified as-such when they exhibit bot-“like” behaviours, but this often requires a number of signals to make this determination (which Shield does automatically also, in order to block disingenuous bots).

To learn a bit more about bot signals etc., you may wish to read up on it here:
https://onedollarplugin.com/blog/bot-signals/

Also, on top of this, Shield automatically verifies and filters legitimate search engine bot traffic, so you wont even see these bots in the traffic log in the first place.

So for the traffic watcher, we lean towards simply cataloging the traffic as it comes through, and wherever possible not placing labels on it which are very possibly incorrect.

I hpoe that all makes sense, and I appreciate your suggestion, Brandon.

Sure, I understand it can be difficult to correctly identify all bot traffic. I’d just like to be able to filter the traffic log to mostly only see human traffic.

One way this could be accomplished would be to allow filtering by user agent. Looking at my Shield Security traffic watch, I see user agents with things like “AspiegelBot”, “SemrushBot”, and “AhrefsBot”. If I could create a filter to say “If user agent contains xyz, don’t show” that would help.

Any chance of a feature like that being added? There’s just so much bot traffic, it makes the traffic tab much less useful. Wordfence makes it super simple to filter out what they’ve identified as bots.

—
Brandon