Bots

[Spitfire]

Can someone tell me what a Google[Bot] or a Yahoo{Bot] or an MSN[Bot] is /are in the user lists ???
They are in a different colour and you can't click on them

I thought Bots were sort of malicious lttle programmes that can be harmful

Enlightenment please

[Mayfly]

bot is short for 'web robot' I believe & they do automated tasks

[Wedgy]

As Mayfly says ....

They are basically search engine crawlers, just scanning the site to populate their index. I know we now have over 290+ entries in Google alone

Unlike other forums, the version I use treats these crawlers like users, so I can control what they can do and see (and more importantly, what they cannot do and cannot see ).

I think I explained this in more detail somewhere else in Forum Support a while ago


Edit: here

[Tom.com]

Bots are mainly search engine crawlers updating their index.

The great thing about this latest version of these forums is that I have full control over them. I can control if they have access and what they can see. This is why, unlike other forums, they are visible as "normal" users on the index page.

The most active ones you will see are:

Google [Bot]
Yahoo [Bot]
Ask Jeeves [Bot]
Gigabot [Bot]
MSN [Bot]
Scoutjet [Crawler]
XML Sitemap Generator [bot]

All are search engine crawlers, except for the last one, which is a crawler i use to generate the forum's site map for submitting to google

I asked about it a while ago

[Spitfire]

Ooooppsss - if all else fails search the site first

Thanks - that explains it nicely

[Wedgy]

You have prompted me to get round to changing their name though ... agree "Bot" has negative connotations

[Spitfire]

You have prompted me to get round to changing their name though ... agree "Bot" has negative connotations

All in a days work Wedgy - totally my intention - any other help you need just ask .... someone else