Spiders and Bots

I have a few questions regarding spiders and bots. From what I understand, bots are useful in indexing pages for search engines. Is there a downside to bots?

What exactly is a spider? And what does it do? And how does the forum's "Anti Spider" mode factor into the spider equation?

I'm trying to understand why there's so many repeat guests who's host info is spider or bot related.

-Todd

An Internet spider is a program designed to "crawl" over the World Wide Web, the portion of the Internet most familiar to general users, and retrieve locations of Web pages. It is sometimes referred to as a webcrawler. Many search engines use webcrawlers to obtain links, which are filed away in an index. When a user asks for information on a particular subject, the search engine pulls up pages retrieved by the Internet spider. Without spiders, the vast richness of the Web would be all but inaccessible to most users, rather as the Library of Congress would be if the books were not organized.

So that begs the question...... what does the Anti Spider mode do? Just keep private info like emails from being "spidered"?

-Todd

Where did you see this anti-spider information?

Admin CP >> Security

This will help
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

Thanks APE. Clear as mud.

Still don't get what the Anti-Spider Mode in the CP does.

All it really dose is stops your members data from getting read from the profiles

Hello,

BravoSix wrote:Still don't get what the Anti-Spider Mode in the CP does.

Anti-spider mode prevents use of website mirroring software and makes it harder to squat your computer hardware by mygales and spiders

Thanks guys. Much appreciated.

-Todd