Bots.

What are they?

Bot's, short for "Robots"
A quick definition from Wikipedia, verified by numerous sites across the web.

Wikipedia wrote:
Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyses and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. Each server can have a file called robots.txt, containing rules for the spidering of that server that the bot is supposed to obey.

In addition to their uses outlined above, bots may also be implemented where a response speed faster than that of humans is required (e.g., gaming bots and auction-site robots) or less commonly in situations where the emulation of human activity is required, for example chat bots.


What do these robot's do?

99% of Internet Bots usually just "reference" your site to increase their knowledge of it, and give the most accurate & up-to-date information about your site.
In addition, when the Google Bot visit's your site, it also is giving you a "Cache" version of your site.


So what's the other, remaining 1% of these bot's?

Well, this 1% is an astonishingly large amount of bot's.
These very rare & very few bots can do what the other bot's cannot do.
They can:

Register on your site
Create NEW topic's on your site
Reply to current topic's on your site
Spam your forum


So, how exactly can I tell who's a bot, and who's not a bot?

Well, there's no rule of thumb to detect weather or not it is a bot unfortunately.
However they generally have a really "out there" names such as "123456789sdjhiuj" which can also be a spammer, the other way you could tell is it has a really stupid email address.


I want to know what bot's are enabled on my forum, can I do it?

Yes you can, just add "/robots.txt" to the end of your forum's URL, so it will look like: [Only admins are allowed to see this link]

Can I control these bot's?

No, as forumotion does not allow user's to access their database they cannot access the Bot's management.
However, if you want you CAN disallow robot's visiting your site altogether. This is strongly not-recommended as it will decrease your "Google Page Reference" and possibly decrease the number of people visiting the forum.
If you still want to disallow the bot's from visiting, then =>
Navigate to: Admin panel >> Display ( Tab ) >> Homepage / Generalities >> Scroll down until you see "Additional meta tags" >> Click the >> Select the default "Create a meta tag type", then fill in the details:
"name" attribute : Robots
"content" attribute : noindex, nofollow


Now just hit "Add" If you get a blank page, just give it a few minutes and refresh
If it exceeds 5 minutes, just go to the URL bar, and remove everything but your forums url, thus making it the basic URL.

So on the support forum it would look like: [Only admins are allowed to see this link]

Then when I make it the basic URL it looks like: [Only admins are allowed to see this link]

So, what bot mean's what?

Google bot
The Google bot is the bot from our friend Google, he's just referencing your forum for their database.
He will visit your forum daily no matter what your activity is.

Yahoo! bot
The Yahoo! bot is the bot from Yahoo!.
He is also just referencing your forum, however you need a few members on your forum to persude him to view your forum

Msn bot
This is the bot from Microsoft, msn, bing.com.
You have to have HUGE popularity for him to visit your forum.

Note: It may take up to 3 full weeks for your forum to be index on any one of these bot's.

And that's all folks

this is helpful!

I know it is helpful DaAsianGuy