Bots?

[Firthy2002]

Technically not really a support question per se, but this seems like the most appropriate section of the board to post this question.

What are those [bot]s exactly?

[redsock]

They're search engine "bots", little programs that roam the internet and report back what's on the pages they visit.

Here's a result from Google's ...

http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:vG ... clnk&gl=uk

[Firthy2002]

But how does the board know they are bots, and why do they have names such as Majestic-12?

[redsock]

I think they are designed to inform the forums (phpBB2 etc ...) what they are. They can often read the forums without having to register too, but can't actually take snapshots of it. You can see them in the members lists in grey, but can't click on them.

Here's one that Google took but possibly the forum software had automatically IP banned !

http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:BR ... clnk&gl=uk

Majestic 12 is a search engine just like google, yahoo, msn etc ...

[TheGardner]

here's a list of robots, which are allowed by phpBB to search/use the forums:

Yahoo [Bot]
MSN [Bot]
MSNbot Media
Gigabot [Bot]
Google [Bot]
Baidu [Spider]
Majestic-12 [Bot]
Alexa [Bot]
Ask Jeeves [Bot]
Exabot [Bot]
Google Adsense [Bot]
Seekport [Bot]
TurnitinBot [Bot]
psbot [Picsearch]
YahooSeeker [Bot]
Steeler [Crawler]
YaCy [Bot]
Google Feedfetcher
Heritrix [Crawler]
AdsBot [Google]
Alta Vista [Bot]
FAST Enterprise [Crawler]
FAST WebCrawler [Crawler]
Francis [Bot]
Google Desktop
Heise IT-Markt [Crawler]
IBM Research [Bot]
ICCrawler - ICjobs
MSN NewsBlogs
Metager [Bot]
NG-Search [Bot]
Nutch [Bot]
Nutch/CVS [Bot]
OmniExplorer [Bot]
Online link [Validator]
SEO Crawler
SEOSearch [Crawler]
Sensis [Crawler]
Seoma [Crawler]
Snappy [Bot]
Synoo [Bot]
Telekom [Bot]
Voyager [Bot]
W3 [Sitesearch]
W3C [Linkcheck]
W3C [Validator]
WiseNut [Bot]
Yahoo MMCrawler [Bot]
Yahoo Slurp [Bot]
ichiro [Crawler]

and quite a bunch more of those exist!