What are "bots" and why are they viewing the site?

[Tommy Meehan]

There was one "viewing" the General Discussions Railroad Operations forum with me a while ago. You know at the bottom of each forum's thread page, where it shows who's currently viewing the forum? It listed me, one guest and "MSNMEDIA bot." I thought *maybe* it was someone's weird screen name but it wasn't clickable. So it was a thingy not a human???







"Shhh!" "What?" "Don't look around but there's something in here with us!"

[Marty Feldner]

Googlebot also shows up, there are others. Short version, they are automated programs from search engines, 'crawling' the web to add to their databases.

It's basically how they keep themselves up-to-date. And, they've been a part of the WWW almost from the beginning in the early nineties

[Tommy Meehan]

Oh yes, the "web crawlers." Okay thanks, that's pretty cool then. And also a tiny bit scary. lol They're everywhere!!

[Otto Vondrak]

Yes, we can configure the software to allow webcrawler "bots" to scan and catalog the content of our web site. That makes it more searchable with the popular search engine sites. It's nothing malicious, it actually helps all of us.

-otto-