Automatic Publish/Unpublish - Will Google bots trigger Published On - Bob's Guides article mentioned

I have a question, just out of curiosity.

I was reading this page in Bob Ray's web site, http://bobsguides.com/published-on-publish-date-confusion.html where he mentions that the published on or unpublished on readings come from when the first visitor to the page arrived and not when the page was actually set for publishing. So, if a page is set to publish on September 1st, but the site is a low traffic one and the first visitor to that page does not arrive until September 5, then the published on reading will display as having published on September 5. I hope I understood that correctly.

Okay, that makes sense for visitors, as in, human visitors. But what about things like Google bots and such, to that page? Wouldn't those things visit sites often enough to trigger the published on record as soon as the published date is? Doesn't Google visit pages sooner than humans? Possibly, every day? Do the bots trigger the published on feature at all?

No problem or issue here... just curious. [ed. note: waizen last edited this post 14 years, 1 month ago.]

MODX has no way of knowing who is visiting, it just knows that a request came in for a page.

So, yes, the bots will trigger publication. You'd have to look at your sever log to see how often bots are visiting various pages. It varies from site to site.


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PLEASE, PLEASE specify the version of MODX you are using.
MODX info for everyone: http://bobsguides.com/modx.html [ed. note: BobRay last edited this post 14 years, 1 month ago.]

It must be noted, however, that you can force this issue when you create these by manually setting these dates.

If a page isn't published, there won't be any automatic links to it, so how would a 'bot even know it was there to access it? I was under the impression that all of the site's resources' publish/unpublish status was stored in a file, and this file was checked on every page load, and any (other) pages that were due to be published/unpublished were handled at that time. Or does Revo do it differently?

Yes, I meant to say a request for a page, not a request for *that* page. AFAIK, it's done that way in Revo, though I'm not sure the info is in an actual file.


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PLEASE, PLEASE specify the version of MODX you are using.
MODX info for everyone: http://bobsguides.com/modx.html

You are correct, BobRay. Any page request can trigger an autopublish.