MREInfo.com

Hey, look at who was browsing with me on the forum tonight...LOL!

Yep - the new forums software tracks which bots are indexing the site. I've seen some mods that remove those guys from the "who's online" list but I like seeing them.

Hey guys,

I'm not sure I'm following this thread correctly. I took a look at DD's post and I wasn't sure what I was looking at, but then read Kman's. Now I'm sort of getting an idea. I know what BOT's are and I've had a bad experience with them hijacking a computer but what is the significance of seeing them on the forum here. Sorry, If I sound computer stupid or something but if someone could post a reply with a little bit of detail that would be great. Not sure if this something we need to be aware of or what. Thanks

Treesuit, "bots" can be many things on the Internet - they can be "bad" bots that are sent out by malicious hackers to do damage or they could be "good" bots and those are the ones I'm talking about. In this case, these are bots from companies like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. who go out and index web pages. That's how places like Google work - they send out bots to find web pages and then they index that information and make it searchable.

Googlebot and other mainstream search bots are great examples of good bots. If you look in your web server's access logs, the bots clearly indicate who they are and usually tell you how to contact the owners if you don't want them indexing your site. Here's an example from our logs: So what the forums software does is when it sees a known bot come in, instead of just adding them to the count of guests online, it actually tell you which bots it is that's visiting.

Kman,

Wow, that's very informative, thanks for that bit of info. So that is what were seeing right now. My, my, my were certainly becoming more popular on the web.