Stopping Bots

I'm pretty new at this forum thing and I'm teaching myself as I go but I can't find anywhere that permits me to stop bots. My forum is a private, referal only forum for daycare providers. I can't have my members privacy at stake and bots does just that. I don't need them or want them accessing my site. Please help me get rid of them. Even if someone would be able to do the following for me, as suggested by a friend:
"It appears that forum motion is set up to allow google to automatically bot forums. What you could do is ask the forum motion techies to go in and add a "robot.txt" file. If they did that it would solve all your problems."
Thanks for any suggestions, if you are going to provide instructions please dumb them way down for me.
Thanks

You can not really stop bots. Make your forum where only members can see it. Bots are considered guests on forums. Bots can only see what guests can see on your forum.

Admin Control Panel > Display > Homepage > Structure and hierarchy > Display bots in statistics of the forum: No

The most you can do to block bots is hide everything from guests.

All Google Bots do is index the sites for it's search engine. Just hide everything from guests and they can't take any information except the URL.