bot listed under who's online

As many times as I have been on this forum, I don't ever recall seeing a bot listed under the who's online section. Have I been missing this all this time or is this something new? Just curious.

Jeff

The bots are tracked by the forum, it's built in phpbb3 feature. I have it set to hide their online status though, that would be the constant hidden users listed because they are always here. Not sure why you could see it and you shouldn't see it. Frankly I'm stumped at the moment. I'll see what I can find.

No big deal Richard. I just don't recall ever seeing them listed. Your busy enough already. Don't go out of your way to find out, unless your wondering why also.

Jeff

Interesting.... notice it is greyed out?

Well again It's standard feature on phpBB3, most will have them displayed. If you look on who's online list on phpbb.com you'll see many of them:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/

In the case of the bots and phpBB they are in a group like everyone else, they even have a profile but of course they will never access it. I set their preferences to hidden, I don't think they should be included at all but haven't gotten around to modifying so they are gone completely.

When a legitimate bot or anyone visits for that matter it/you send a user agent so the site owner can identify what they are using. For members the user agent would be the browser string. That can be helpful if for example you want to change things server side specifically to adress issues with that browser before the HTML is compilled and sent back to the browsers.

In the case of bots and phpBB you it's used to mask some aspects of the forum. Here's Googles cache:

http://74.125.93.132/search?sourceid=na ... ads.com%2F

Some slight difference, for example the user names have been delinked, there's no login link etc. They don't need to be indexing those pages so the links are removed. Really irrelevant as I use robots.txt to prevent it anyway.

On side note you really need to be careful if you're building your own site as SE's frown on this. They call it "cloaking" and generally it would be used for less than legitimate purposes such as serving good content to the bot to get in the index and serving bad content to regular visitors.. I intend on removing it fully when I get around to it, actually was quite concerned about it to begin with.