Forum security - bots

by lisa1302 February 9th 2011, 2:25 am

Hello

I panicked today because I saw on my admin panel that a guest was viewing a forum which I know isn't visible to guests, and is only open to people with group membership (its baby pictures!)

When I went in the forum it said there was a Bing bot in there

How can this happen - I don't understand why a bot would be allowed into a restricted forum - is it indexing the content?!

Does that mean that all the restricted forums are searched and indexed and the content can be found on search engines, even if the actual forum cant be entered by whoever searches?

by Social_King February 9th 2011, 2:34 am

Don't worry the Forum Bots are not real people just simple computer programs that check forums. Don't worry your forum should still be protected. Smile

by Harperboy326 February 9th 2011, 2:37 am

To clarify what Flame Hawk said:

Bots are search crawlers that wonder around the Internet looking for sites that updated their site. When you update your site, you also change meta tags. The crawlers notice this and they crawl on your forum and look for the change and note it. So, like the Google bot, they look for your site then index it on the search query. Same for the Yahoo! bot or the Bing bot. No worries are needed.

by Social_King February 9th 2011, 2:44 am

Thanks for clarifying that. Didn't know how to explain it. Smile

by MrMario February 9th 2011, 4:57 am

Bots see what guest see. So don't worry.

by lisa1302 February 9th 2011, 11:11 pm

I thought that they saw what guests saw too, but I still don't get why it was in a forum guests cant go.

Anyway I'll trust you guys who clearly know what you are on about!

Thanks