That there are all these new accounts like msn.com or yahoo.com. I'm not being horrible to these people but whats with this new style of account names?
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That there are all these new accounts like msn.com or yahoo.com. I'm not being horrible to these people but whats with this new style of account names?
They're not usernames, it's something to do with advertising..
This is how Seeker explained it:
They are bots, but are bots of the good kind. :D
These are all search engines crawling over our website and categorizing our posts.
Oh well thanks for clearing that up.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Burns
so it seeams that they are nice bots but its in there plans to take over the world
:bowdown:
Heh. They're spiders, yeah. They're run by their respective companies (i.e. msn.com is ran by MSN, yahoo.com is ran by Yahoo) and go through each page linked to add to their search index/database so that when you later go to their search engines (google.com; yahoo.com whatever) and type in search terms found on the page...you'll get linked to the pages spidered. That is the world's longest paragraph.
In short they're not real accounts and you would notice that they don't have profiles or links to click on either.
I'm confused as to why they show up at all, rather than just being "guests." :?:
I'm guessing it's a security issue. You don't want all types of bots to get access to the site (spambots are evil), so bots need to be approved with an account of sorts to get access.Quote:
Originally Posted by DuB
if they did not show up would we be having this conversation?Quote:
Originally Posted by DuB
no
so they have 3 purposes
1 to aid in searching
2 take over the world
3 invoke conversations why they exist
I haven't seen any of them :? , could you post an example?
Look at the area where it shows users online and you should see yahoo.com without being under lined.
yep, they are search engine spiders
without them, there would be no entries for this site in google, etc.
they do not have user accounts here
they are guests - so they can only index what guests are allowed to view
however, the site knows when they are indexing stuff (special entries in the user-agent header)
by and large they're nothing to worry about
(except the msnbot, that's so inefficient it sits on your site for hours on end dutifully indexing and re-indexing all popular topics that change often, sapping up bandwidth and seemingly never leaving, but hey, that's just life.....)