Guest Problem?

[Akai]

It's about 6:30am (central) and I find 14 people viewing the Fan Interactive forum. I'm a little curious, wondering how many people were on... But I find this:

http://i32.tinypic.com/23k1xmq.png

Do you think we should make them register in order to see the forum? It's just a thought.

[Kaboom]

OMG! 88 guests! I wonder how many of them were bots... especially as right now there's 10 guests, and 8 of them are bots.

[Akai]

And this was at 6:30 in the morning.... Wow.

[Brandon]

They were probably bots, anyway.

[Akai]

Probably and probably not. 9__9

You never know. Is there any way to block to bots? (Whack-a-bot, lol)

[Kaboom]

If vBulletin works anything like phpBB, there's an option in the admin panel for administering bots, including removing them. however, it's not a good idea to delete them due to the risk of errors on the forum (several times I've seen a bot trying to post)

[Akai]

Hmm... Well, let them. >=D We can just delete it... =/ Unless it's a Porn-bot.

[FreezeWarp]

This is how its currently set up:

-Search Spiders, Guests, and Members are shown.
-Typically as the number of users goes up, the percentage of them being bots goes down

So, if we had 88 users, its very possible only 20 of them were bots (~30%), where if we had 8, it would be more like 7 (~90%).

As for kaboom's comment, the bots shown ARE only Spiders, the site itself is checking everything behind the scenes without anyone knowing.

[Akai]

Oh. I always thought those "spiders" are the result of someone's search. Like if someone was looking for "Absol Info" and one of Blaziken's POTW was linked to that person, and they went.... erm, never mind. I confused myself.

[FreezeWarp]

lol, no.

A spider is a search engine indexing service. You can't disable them unless you change the meta to "noindex", which would be the worst thing you can do for a site because search engines won't be able to find them. Searches them selves have no relevance.

[Akai]

I'm glad I made you laugh. I'm so confused.