Bots on the Forum

[Lunaticonthegrass]

Looking at the online users of this forum over the past week or so, we appear to have two regular Bots online - Ahrefs and Semrush.

As I don't know masses about how the internet works, I'm wondering what they are, why they are here and if they should be here. Can anyone enlighten me?

P.S. Hello to our new non-human members. Any plans for an FNC soon?

[DavidC]

They are both fairly well-known names in "search engine optimisation" and related fields - basically, helping companies to appear higher up in the listings when people search using search engines like Google and Bing, highlighting errors with incorrect links between web pages, etc. Assuming the bots are genuine ones from those companies, it would be pretty normal for them to be scanning the publicly-visible parts of a well-established website. There's a lot more to it than that, but hopefully that's a reasonable overview.

[tubeguru]

Yes, they're harmless things that just update search engines with details from websites.

I just had a look at the "bot" page in the admin section, and we had six bots listed. Three have never even visited the site, so I deleted them. Bing hasn't been here since 2015, so I deleted that one too.

The other two mentioned in the first post are both active, and have been visiting for a while now. I mean, I can always just delete them any time I like ...

[Golf]

they boris spies or gates,s

[tubeguru]

they boris spies or gates,s

You'd better stop using the forum then, in case they find out where you live and force you to have the vaccine ...