On the active users panel at the bottom of the forum, I often see things like Yahoo [Bot] and MSN [Bot], what are these?
Are they do to with increasing a pages search rank? Are the cataloguing the site for their cached database? Whenever I see bot, I autmatically think "Spambot", but this is obviously not the case here.
All help appreciated.
I think that they are part of of Christian conspiracy against atheist. They are keeping an eye on us :evil:
Search engines send out web crawlers (bots) which crawl web sites in search of either relevant content for ads or search result listings.
PHPBB3 has it set up by default to list these bots in the who's online list. Each known bot has permissions similar to other users. This allows me to keep them from crawling private areas of the site. My guess is that when I edit the bot permission settings it automatically edits the robot.txt file for the site (a file typically used to inform web crawlers what they should and should not look at).
Much clearer now, thanks.
Also, one of the ads I got the other day was for an exlcusivley Muslim Matrimonial website, those guys don't mess about when it comes to love!