Batboard

Board Index Page wrote:
Who is online
In total there are 16 users online :: 6 registered, 1 hidden and 9 guests (This data is based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 118 on Mon Jan 24, 2005 8:51 pm

Registered users: Google [Bot], MSN [Bot], MSNbot Media, Terry_Glover, Wowbagger, Yahoo [Bot]
Legend: Administrators, Global moderators

This "Who Is Online" info. appears at the bottom of the "Board Index" page.

What is Google [Bot], MSN [Bot], MSNbot Media etc... These appear to be counted as "Registered Users" who are logged in.

What does it all mean?

Terry

It's googles,yahoo and MSN search engine indexing pages for their search engines.

So the search spiders are registered users? That seems a bit odd - did they register themselves, or did the site operators register them?

IF they registered themselves, I would take that as a sign that the site registration procedure needs to be tightened up to keep (spam) bots out.

It's actually a "feature" of the new board system. This allows me to give permissions to the bots group to visit different forums and such. That way, Google can index the forums like a registered user, or I can keep it out of certain forums if I so choose.

I can also track when they come, where they go if I so choose. I haven't even gotten as far as to play with the feature...

-Alex

Wowbagger wrote:So the search spiders are registered users? That seems a bit odd - did they register themselves, or did the site operators register them?

IF they registered themselves, I would take that as a sign that the site registration procedure needs to be tightened up to keep (spam) bots out.

There are ways to verify the various well-behaved spiders out there (for instance, for Googlebot, do a reverse lookup on the IP-->name, do a forward lookup on the name, make sure everything looks right, and verify the domain is *.googlebot.com). These ID procedures are embedded into the phpBB code.

Fair warning: Google search bots are not always benign. Before I all but accused Google of a DoS attack, one of their bots was hammering (and I do mean HAMMERING) my FTP site with a ton of anonymous login/logout attempts daily. There was no crawling of directories, no indexing whatsoever -- Just the stupid 'bot logging in and immediately logging out.

The full story may be found here.

http://www.bluefeathertech.com/googleabuse.html

Keep the peace(es).