Watched By Bots

One thing I enjoy on CPF is to see what threads other members are reading.
You can do this by clicking on 'Currently Active Users' at the bottom of the main page.

It's nice to know what other people are interested in, as well as finding threads that you would
not have noticed unless you go through each and every one of the sub forums.

Alright.. peeking at what others are reading might seem creepy, but this is what I did not see until today.
We are being watched by bots

don't worry.. we are always being watched.

csshih said:

don't worry.. we are always being watched.

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True, very true.
I was just wondering why I did notice the new visitors until now :thinking:

Huh, I find it interesting they actually created an account, instead of just going around anonymously.

nope, they don't actually create an account.. the forum automatically recognizes the bot.

"They walk among us..." oo:

*plays twilight zone music*
oo:

csshih said:

nope, they don't actually create an account.. the forum automatically recognizes the bot.

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Hmm, seems to me it would be more beneficial for search engines to not be recognized by website they are indexing.

Some sites will not let you view a thread without an account.

It would be against logic if they were to repel search engines that could direct more traffic to their site & hopefully more members.

Search bots have to follow certain rules when crawling and indexing websites because their processes can be extremely server/resource intensive. Some of you may remember about a year or so ago when Yahoo was bringing CPF (and many other websites) to a screeching halt by ignoring the rules. They have since fixed their screwup and are minimally intrusive while doing their job.

It is most definately in our best interest for them to be crawling around! This is how they build the search engines that you may use. In addition, it is definately more beneficial for the software to identify the bots as the software has built in restrictions as to where the bots can go and what they can index. Member profiles are off-limits to legitimate bots. And they do respect it. Also so that site owners can get a more accurate account of actual "warm bodies" surfing around. Bots are not included in stats such as the Alexa rankings.

That is really, *really* cool!

You are being observed

Thank you for the explanation Greta

I thought these bots trawled information behind the scenes and was suprised to see them
listed in the Who's Online list.

Hey, maybe they are actually interested in ROPs and what lube to use :laughing:

nekomane said:

maybe they are actually interested in ROPs and what lube to use :laughing:

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You do realise that they work with virtual light, right? They don't need anything we'd recognize as photons.

What is a bot?

MARNAV1 said:

What is a bot?

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I stumbled upon 'who is online' a while back when meaning to go to subscribed threads. I look at it now sometimes as I find that the guests are often reading obscure threads from years back, so I follow them in and there's good info to be learned. It's also interesting to use that to step back in time and see what people were doing and discussing back in ye olde days of "OMG have you heard there's gonna be an LED that puts out 50 lumens?"