Does anyone know anything about bots, i know they scour the internet and google and yahoo use them to find stuff, but i see on this new forum software thaat they are allowed buy default and i am wondering if i should disable them.

I know nothing about Bot's..... The ones I have encountered are JERKS.....

What are the Bots on my forum and what do they do?
You may be wondering about the bots that come on your forum from time to time and what they do. There is a pretty simple explanation for what they do and where they came from. Bots such as 'Google [Bot]' and 'Yahoo [Bot]' come on your forum and they look for things to put on to their search engines that they came from. What they do is come onto your forum and take information such as posts and profile content and then put it on their search engines.

If you have a private forum then you can prevent them from coming on and taking things from your forum by removing their forum permissions. Even if you want your site to be hidden, you shouldn't actually do this because if they are not allowed anywhere on the forum all they will be able to do is insert the index page link to the search engines and the chances of being found on searches will be minimal.

A lot of people don't think about the permissions for bots and think that if they just sort out the Guests permissions then it's fine, however that will prevent your forum from coming on searches. It is advisory that regardless of weather it is a private forum you should allow bots access to a few forums even if your forum is private and you don't want random people coming on to the site.

A question that does come up a lot is "...Bots don't come on my forum, what do I do?" There is a simple answer to that. Just advertise and wait. If you advertise on other sites then bots will follow links provided in posts and then be lead from one site to another. If you have advertised on multiple sites then all you have to do is wait and then will come sooner or later, it just takes time.



Here is some info on forum bots.
I got off the net. I hope this helps...
DAle

thanks dale that is a good explanation, i am going to turn off bots permission for right now and think about this ,as other than word of mouth and a few other things i am not actively advertising the group