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Guests?
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:42 am
by A dude named Vince
One last thing before I randomly leave for an undetermined amount of time again. Has anyone ever noticed that we always seem to have a handful of guests? There always seems to be one or two around, but when I looked a second ago I saw 8. Do a lot of you hide your online status, or do we just have a bunch of lurkers?
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:43 am
by gforce422
Could be lurkers. Or bots. More likely the latter.
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:44 am
by A dude named Vince
I hadn't considered bots.... Though I fail to understand why one would want one for a forum. Besides flaming or a crap load of alts.
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:48 am
by gforce422
I think the bots just try to harvest people's email addresses and then attempt to send them spam based on their keywords.
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:52 am
by Extreme-Speed
Google/Yahoo bots!
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:54 am
by datherman
I hadn't considered bots.... Though I fail to understand why one would want one for a forum. Besides flaming or a crap load of alts.
Or indexing for search engines perhaps?
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:58 am
by gforce422
I hadn't considered bots.... Though I fail to understand why one would want one for a forum. Besides flaming or a crap load of alts.
Or indexing for search engines perhaps?
This is probably the right answer.
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 1:13 pm
by Doc Sigma
I thought GoogleBot showed up as... a user named GoogleBot. Maybe that's only on other boards...
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 5:52 pm
by Dr. Sticks
yeah, some boards are coded to list "Google.com" and "Yahoo.com" and stuff like that. interestingly enough, on another board there was a member that had his username changed to Google.com
but, occasionally the guests are banned members like Fritz that still read the forums anyway
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 8:40 pm
by nickspoon
The majority of them are bots (googlebot, yahoo, searchme.com) along with a couple of (probably) human users.
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 10:04 pm
by Archaemic
They only show up listed as bots on phpBB3 and some other board scripts, not on phpBB2.
Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 12:57 am
by Segovia
You know what I noticed? When I check who's online, sometimes I see that a guess is posting a message. Is this possible?
Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 1:14 am
by Dr. Sticks
it means the person hides their online status.
Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 2:59 am
by Segovia
No I hid my online status before and when I post it doesn't show. Plus it also says that there's nobody that is hidden.
Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 6:34 am
by datherman
It has to do with the bots again. I don't know the specifics of how they get to a "post a reply" screen, but I'm sure that's what it is.