Bots - Who and what they are

by Darren1 September 13th 2009, 5:06 am

Bots - Who and what they are

What are Bot?

Bot's is short for "Robots"

A quick definition from Wikipedia, verified by numerous sites across the web.

WikipediaInternet 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 visits 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.

What bot's are enabled on my forum ?
Just add "/robots.txt" to the end of your forum's URL, It should look like: https://help.forumotion.com/robots.txt

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 )  Bots - Who and what they are Portail

Homepage / Generalities  Scroll down until you see "Additional meta tags"  Click the Bots - Who and what they are Ajouter

 Select the default "Create a meta tag type", then fill in the details:

"name" attribute : Robots
"content" attribute : no index, no follow

Now just hit "Add"
For more help on adding your Meta tags see this thread : https://help.forumotion.com/t36994-how-to-add-keywords-metatags?highlight=Metatags
If you have a problem adding the codes please read this thread: https://help.forumotion.com/t124489-how-verifying-meta-tag-in-forumotion-forum?highlight=meta+tags

So, what bot means 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 persuade 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.