Who are all these mysterious "guests"?

[alan refail]

The Forum is very quiet of late, but there always seem to be a large number of "guests". A lot of them seems to be listed as doing things only possible when logged on. Below is a selection from this afternoon. Is this some sort of bug in the recent upgrade, which also removed many, but not all, avatars? Just puzzled

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[Elaine]

Hello Alan. It seems very odd. The button which says "Hide my online status" or words to that effect, where we log in.....could that be anything to do with it?
Cheers.

[alan refail]

Hi Elaine

No; people online appear as registered, hidden or guests. At the moment it reads:

In total there are 46 users online :: 3 registered, 0 hidden and 43 guests

[Elaine]

Right...never explored that option anyway. If you don't have the answer, there is little chance of me coming up with it!
I've just had a look and it says 55, 6 registered, 0 hidden and 49 guests. A couple of Bots were viewing the index page and a topic in general chat.
So, what are these Bots please??

[peter]

Google, yahoo, etc, searche engine web-indexing software. Robot software out on a mission to catalogue and index pur words for the wider www.

[glallotments]

Are they viewing members statuses to find out if we have websites or blogs that they can have a go at spamming! Must admit my blog has recently been swamped by spam. Fortunately very little of it is published being filtered out before it gets to that stage but it does come to my email account to confirm it as spam which is a nuisance. Can't imagine why spammers can't see it just annoys rather than encouraging me to visit their links. Pay gay loans were very active at one time - now it seems to be weight loss sites

[peter]

If they're not logged in then they can't see profiles.

BTW those loans you were offered look discriminatory!

[alan refail]

If they're not logged in then they can't see profiles.

If so, why are they listed as "Viewing member profile"?

[glallotments]

If they're not logged in then they can't see profiles.

BTW those loans you were offered look discriminatory!

Oops should be pay day!

[Elaine]

Thank you Peter. Thought it must be something of the sort.

[peter]

If they're not logged in then they can't see profiles.

If so, why are they listed as "Viewing member profile"?

I don't know, I pre-checked my statement by empirical experiment

[oldherbaceous]

And then they were gone!

[alan refail]

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They're still up to their old tricks. Don't they ever sleep?

[vegpatchmum]

Of course it's possible that some of these guests are from other climes and, as such they are on a different timeline to us and are actually browsing the forum in the evening, afternoon etc and maybe haven't realised this is a British based forum and therefore some of the things we're discussing aren't relevant to their particular needs

That said I hope some of them do decide to say 'Hi' and share their experiences with us

As for the 'Bots', they are a fact of internet life

Oh and is it possible that a guest clicking on a 'Member Profile' will still show as doing that even as they are reading the 'Registered Members Only' message (or whatever the message actually is) that pops up when a guest strays into 'member only' areas?

Vpm
x

[John]

I run a small website for our village hall. Please don't ask me any techno questions because I can only just about do what I have to do! My site has been set up so that I can check up on any visitors. I'm amazed by the number of phantom visitors who come for less than a second - I guess that they are search engine type visitors just doing a quick check on my few simple pages.
Its quite interesting though checking up on visitors because I can see a lot about their computer systems, the browser they use, operating system, pages that they may have viewed and how they have arrived eg as search result.

John