Bots

[sykx]

How are the bots in the users that were here section displayed? Like the Google Bot and Yahoo Bot .. etc... I thought they were invisible and web-crawlers not Bots? lol

 

[Da Gamer]

I think sometimes they are bots and you can allow them to post in some cases

 

[sykx]

I think sometimes they are bots and you can allow them to post in some cases

Hmm, know how I can get my hands on these bots! 😛 lol

 

[Expired Account 2]

The 'bots' you refer to is a RSS feed that has a plug-in on your site that assigns a account to the feed so it will create a thread on your site. It is fairly good for news sections and other things. Most of these posts will not be recorded by search engines like Google and Yahoo. Also there are a shortage of these plug ins and are only for certain software. I only know MyBB that has this plug-in and cost's money to purchase it. I think Vbulletin has a similar plug-in that posts Yahoo answers but that is the only type of thing I have seen.

On the other hand. To answer your question, you can assign a group to your bots to make them appear on the 'who is online' list. You can also alter the names of the bots to your liking. That is what FP have done here. They have altered the name (Or it's how it was found, I don't use this software) and assigned them to the guest user group for them too appear online, hence the gray color.
This is what I assume as once again I do not use this software as I have only ever used MyBB and Vbulletin.

 

[sykx]

Thanks for the information .. I think this would be a great feature for my board .. hmm now how to get them 😛 lol

Rep 4 u! 🙂

 

[CyberFreak]

phpBB3 by default has a list of bots names and their useragents and automatically detects search bot and therefore they show up on the online list. By making them get detected as a bot, it allows us to control what the bots can see and help them index the site better.

 

[sykx]

phpBB3 by default has a list of bots names and their useragents and automatically detects search bot and therefore they show up on the online list. By making them get detected as a bot, it allows us to control what the bots can see and help them index the site better.

Hmm ok.... so they are like an add-on to the web crawlers? By indexing the site I mean 🙂

 

[CyberFreak]

In a way yes. By detecting if a visitor is a search engine, it does allow you extra control on how and what they index.

 

[sykx]

Kool, thanks for the information! 🙂