[scrollaway]

> Since you know they are bots, why couldn't you filter them?

A decent amount can be filtered by UA. This is inconvenient because UA is a very large piece to log and index on, so you need to do UA processing to do anything useful with it and … well by that point it just becomes a chore and I suspect there's good logging services that do this better than you'd spend your time doing yourself.

> On the other hand, couldn't there be bots that run JavaScript which would be tracked client-side?

They exist but they're more rare by nature, because running JS at bot scale is expensive.

[dschooh]

> well by that point it just becomes a chore and I suspect there's good logging services that do this better than you'd spend your time doing yourself.

Which is why the OP suggested using tools like goaccess.