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Old 06-09-2010, 2:47pm   #10
Y2Kvert4me
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Quote:
Originally Posted by FRC Joe View Post
More often than not, search engines and other data collecting "bots" account for the extra guests on forums. If you check the Currently Active Users, you'll see these guests doing non-sensical things like reporting random posts or browsing ancient threads. This is usually search engines which explore every clickable link on a site they are indexing.
This is correct.

The more they are here, the better we become in search result placement on search sites like Google, Yahoo, etc.

In addition to the many search engine crawlers that visit here, there are also web security bots that crawl the site. By security, I mean companies like Websence, a screening service companies employ to auto-filter bad content from their employees using the web. As I understand it, it takes a pretty hardcore porn, gambling, or warez type site to actually be black-flagged and blocked from being viewed, but they are still among the reasons we have censored words, no nudity, etc here.

I've noticed these crawlers tend to appear more often late night, early morning, and on weekends, when people traffic and server load is is usually less. They do this purposely to present as little additional server load of a website as possible when crawling it.

And then also, some of the "guests", are often members here who just aren't logged in at the time. For example, I usually check the site several times a day at work to get a quick look at what's going on, but don't usually log in when doing so.


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