SudokuSolver Forum

The google bot spends a lot of time here now. Also noticed yahoo.

After clicking on "who is online" it said the google bot was "viewing user profile". It doesn't appear to have it's own profile so who's?

Are these bot's going to mess up the thread view stats?

I guess on the plus side, more people could find out about us...but for some reason, it feels a bit sinister having these bots spying on us. Maybe I'm just too cautious. Won't join MySpace or similiar.

Worrier
Ed

They are both regular visitors, just doing their job.

The user profiles of the 66 registered members. This is what every registered member can do, but the bots know how to do this without being a registered member.
By creating or modifying the robots.txt file, Richard can prevent this.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt for details.

Nope!

Googling for "sudokusolver forum" displays 9 images and 4 web results, and 241 web results if you ask for ALL to be included. This is not impressive at all, considering that this forum currently has 392 topics and hundreds of images.

I fully understand you Ed. I am also very cautious about this. However, I do not think joining an Internet Social Network is dangerous in itself. The problem is what you reveal about yourself there. I have the feeling that many of the teenagers that nowadays disclose too much of their private life on Facebook, MySpace, etc. will regret this bitterly later. It has become common that HR people screen applicants and employees by searching the Internet.

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Just spotted the Exalead bot (Exabot) crawling around here:

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I felt the bots thread would be a better place to answer your question, where Ed already has asked it.

From my gut feeling I answered Ed's question with NO, i.e. bots do not increase the view count. If bots increased the view count, my gut feeling would be that the view count would increase steadily for all posts, and would be very high (>1000 )for all old posts.

I decided to investigate closer and found the following thread in the official phpBB forum. Board admins have obviously also asked themselves this question.
My interpretation of the information in the thread is that phpBB version 3.0.3 and newer do not include bot views in the view count. For older phpBB versions a code mod is shown in the thread to prevent bot views from being counted. Since I do not know which version Richard is using (it is a 3.X.Y version), only he can answer your question accurately. By looking around in the forum I have been unable to find its version.

Here a link to a code mod preventing the post author from increasing the view count of his own post. I would like to see this mod implemented here!

Here the link to the original code mod preventing bots from increasing the view count.

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According to an email reply from Richard, the board is currently running phpBB version 3.0.4, so bot views should not be included in the view count.

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