detecting visitor's toolbar

[Tastatura]

in different forum this has been posted:

markus007: I went and blocked alexa users from being able to signup, as well as comscore

This might be trivial to some, but how is this done - How do you know (detect) if visitor is using Alexa toolbar or comscore (or google toolabr, or yahoo, etc)?
Thanks

[Pfui]

Personally, I don't know why you'd want to penalize people just because they have a certain toolbar installed -- unless, of course, a specific spy- or malware toolbar is wreaking havoc on your site. People may not even be using a toolbar when they visit you, and potentially, you're talking about a lot of people.

Anyway, to get an idea of toolbar use on your site, if you can access your server's access log, search it and see what kinds of agents come up. Here's a selection from my log, in no particular order:

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Blingo Toolbar 1.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; GoogleToolbar 4.0.513.2948-big; Windows XP 5.1; MSIE 6.0.2900.2180)"

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; GoogleToolbar 3.0.128.1-big; Windows XP 5.1)"

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Alexa Toolbar; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; FunWebProducts; Alexa Toolbar; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)"

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Every Toolbar; SIMBAR Enabled; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; America Online Browser 1.1; rev1.2; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Alexa Toolbar)"

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; CursorZone Grip Toolbar 2.08; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Grip Toolbar 2.07a)"

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Rare-Lyrics Toolbar; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

How you block people with toolbars identified in their UA strings depends on what kind of server you have, its capabilities, and whether you can use them. (For example, if your server is running Apache, and mod_rewrite is installed, and you can use .htaccess files, you can block UA strings containing the words Toolbar and toolbar.)

[Key_Master]

Javascript detection.

[milanmk]

This one is for Google ToolBar.

<object id="googleBar" classid="clsid:00EF2092-6AC5-47c0-BD25-CF2D5D657FEB" style="display:none;"></object>

<script type="text/javascript">
if(window.attachEvent && document.googleBar && typeof(googleBar.Search)!= "undefined")
{
toolbar was detected, put your code here.
}
</script>

Similarly you can check for other ToolBars also.

[Pfui]

Why would you want to detect toolbar use? And would you have to put that script on every page?

[Tastatura]

I don’t have any plans to discriminate against visitors based on presence of the toolbar, nor ‘type’ of the toolbar that they might have. I am just curious, from technical prospective, how this (detection) is possible – i.e. just want to learn

[Tastatura]

I did not realize that toolbar info is shown as part of the UA info. I have Google toolbar v3, however toolbar info never showed in my access log files (when I accessed my site). Page Rank option is not turned on, so that *might* be why….

Thanks to all for info.

[Pfui]

Tastatura, I understand (and share:) your curiosity. Thus my two earlier Qs, basically intended for those who mentioned JavaScript detection, about why/when detection would be useful or necessary, and also where the JS code would go (e.g., if only on the main page, what about visitors coming in through other pages, etc.).

[Key_Master]

You use JavaScript toolbar detection to gather statistical information about your visitors toolbar usage. It's no different than using JavaScript to get browser info.

You can then use that information to directly target services and features to that visitor.

For example, Google allows publishers to create a custom toolbar button that the visitor can add to their toolbar.

[google.com...]