hi,
My forum is password protected, hence only approved members can access the Index after login, nevertheless, I see in the statistics that guest are able to connect to the site with IP coming from other countries.... how can it be ? all forums are set to be authorized only to members. obviously I did my own test and you can't access the forums without login ?

Hi!

I think if you disallowed acces to the forums, topics and other forum content. If yes, be sure they don't see your content. Or, you can try to log out from your account and try it.

Just accesing the forum adress they are listed in Who is online list. But they see only these things:
- Logo;
Widgets (if you have these, and if you don't selected the permissions for these);
- Footer links (phpBB, Create a free forum, Report abuse etc.).
- Nav links (Register and Log in, depends of the navbar permissions);
- And of course Log in form from the index.

Note, google anyway will acces your forum, and index it to site. But, as all the guests it can't index another pages from forum, just index/main page.

Hi,

Just to rectify Coddy's post, Google will only ever see what Guests can see, no more, no less

so I tried and no guest can see the forums in the index but still in "who is online" I see guests and its always from different countries that small chances they would enter my forum.

strange

Do not worry one bit, they are not seeing anything, if at best, they wold be seeing something similar to this:
=> https://help.forumotion.com/f24-
or
=> https://help.forumotion.com/admin

They can not, and will not see anything, other then a page saying they don't have rights to view it.

cheers !