Ack! There's 97 guests online as I type this. :scared: I know most of them are probably bots and spammers. :ph34r:

wow now its up to 117!!!! :o !

and right now it's 0!!! :o .... I guess you guys scared them all away :rofl:

I've never noticed that before - there are 90 now!!

and 79 now.
Well this is weird. I do notice guests and mostly there are about 3 till 10.

WTF is going on?

Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:12 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:12 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:12 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:12 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:12 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:12 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:12 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:11 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:11 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:11 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:11 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:11 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:10 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:10 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:10 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:10 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:10 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:10 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:10 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:10 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:10 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:10 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:09 AM
Guest Viewing Board Index Mar 20 2008, 10:09 AM

and the list go's on.
all of them are viewing board index besides one so this is what? bots? what does that mean exactly?

A bot can be one of many things. An example of a friendly bot is like Google's spider bot which scours and indexes the web. Because that process is automated by a process on their server, it's referred to as a bot (which I believe is short for robot).

An example of a bad, naughty bot is one that scans all the pages of a forum looking for email addresses to "harvest" and add to spam lists. Again, that' procedure is entirely automated.

Thanks cherie. And what do you think this is?

most likely bad bots. We've had a huge deluge of spammers signing up for our board lately. Luckily, Cheesy and I approve each registration manually. Otherwise, I'm sure we'd be overrun with spam in no time. (Though I was trying to think of a way of handling that once we move, put the new users into a restricted group which requires their posts to be moderated until they've posted 2 or 3 times, and then it goes to the regular group. But I'm just thinking out loud here, something to run by the mods when all that happens...)

But yeah, there's probably a Google or other indexing engine spider bot every once in a while, but you wouldn't really see more than a single connection or two from them. Naughty bots definitely don't care about thrashing your server with as many connections as they can dish out. :whip:

Can't you have something on the registration to fill out that asks the person why they want to join or where they know about Bookobsessed from?

bad bots?

Damn. They are back. It was quiet in the afternoon (my time) but now they are back. Must be Americans. :evil: :rofl:

I don't like it. 87 now. :angry:

Actually, I neglected to point this before, but alll these bots are also the reason why we have to approve the Guest posts in the Exchange forum. For if we did not, that forum would be quickly overrun with spam in a matter of minutes. :erm:

And oh boy it's been some pictures that are very naughty. :o Of course there's usually clickable link ones too.

Oh they're back are they? Seems like they alllll show up at the same time every now and then!

That is a lot of guests

I think you mut be right, Marlene. Only 2 guests and 1 member on the board at the moment (the latter is me). We Europeans are much too polite to send an invasion of bots onto the site.

Mind you, it does mean I'm talking to myself again! :giggle: