I'm sure others have noticed this as well, at the bottom of the main forum page, where you can view the list of people who have been active in the last 15 minutes, three names always appear to be online, 'Google', 'Baidu', and 'Yahoo!', despite not being proper accounts that you can click on and view the profiles.

How come these names are listed?

These are Crawler bots

(09-21-2012 01:56 AM)Bositman Wrote:  These are Crawler bots

Ahh I see, thank you. From the Wikipedia page it says:

"Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for sending spam)."

So Google and Yahoo!, for example, use these bots to collect information and improve their search results? I wonder how the forums can display a name though if they haven't registered a username?

It's in mybb's database, they have a bot list so they display it there when it shows up

Thanks for the info. When I first noticed those names on the list not so long ago I thought someone actually called themselves Google and Yahoo!

(09-21-2012 08:20 PM)Rolento Wrote:  Thanks for the info. When I first noticed those names on the list not so long ago I thought someone actually called themselves Google and Yahoo!

would be a good trolling account

I agree it would get banned quickly though! There is a registered user called yahoo actually, I wonder what would have happened if they tried to put an ! at the end?

This online list actually useful for me to predict spambots, seriously.

Also used the list to follow other members or guest to a thread (not stalking) because some of them were interesting to read.

same here Ice Queen Zero.

VBA-M