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?
(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?
same here Ice Queen Zero.
