Just noticing the online list....

[morvelaira]

And it seems we have a spy! o.O

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Or just a bot. It amused me...

[magikeh]

damn bots have been on every time i looked today, thats a fair comparison to the fact that Ive only seen it 2 times other than today...

[darahalian]

I've seen the google one many times, but I also saw a yahoo bot once as well.

[grimper12341]

Bots, also known as spiders (they crawl the web :P), are sent out by various search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and Google. They browse forums and gather data from posts so that the site can be indexed by the search engine for faster searching. Generally they have all the powers of a guest; ie they can't post or view restricted sections of the forums.

If bots don't visit the forum, none of the forum posts will show up in a search which ish bad D:

[morvelaira]

Still. It amused me. Which is why I shared.

[magikeh]

And so we thank you for this wonderful post. It Was and shall be an eye opener for the whole community!! =P

[blazeboy91]

Is it weird i saw google bot reading this topic?

[HavokSCOUT]

Just saw a bing bot

[Battosay]

Yeah, nothing weird :
http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... wer=182072

[Razzle]

A bot can be stopped from 'reading' the forums by changing to robot.txt or something (www.sargunster.com/robot.txt) but that will block it from certain bits of the site, but then again some bots deliberately read the robot.txt see that you don't want them in a directory (/dontlook.html) and will go and have a look (not google or 'polite' bots) which you can then set a trap to see which ones do it etc.

First time that piece of information maybe relevant and I feel silly for posting it ^^

[HavokSCOUT]

All I can say is this:

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[Kwilt]

I'm half tempted to make a GoogleBot account, just to screw with you guys, since there be paranoia upon this ship.

[BinoAl]

I'm half tempted to make a GoogleBot account, just to screw with you guys, since there be paranoia upon this ship.

Haha I already considered it, but I'm lazy so I didn't go through with it :D

[morvelaira]

I'm not paranoid. Honest! Why ever would you think that? *loud noise* *defensive crouch twitch*

But seriously... I'm kind of a forum noob. I'd never seen a google bot or anything like that before, and didn't know about them. Now I know. And knowing is half the battle.

GI JOE! :D

[darahalian]

I'm half tempted to make a GoogleBot account, just to screw with you guys, since there be paranoia upon this ship.

That might work to scare some people, but since the "Google (bot)" text shows up in gray, instead of the normal blue, most people would probably realize what was going on.