[sprite1950]

Sometimes when I am browsing a forum and I look at who is online it will say there are bots present. I've always wondered how this is detected. Are there special tools to detect them and how effective are they? Do bots sometimes slip through the net?

[lightning18]

I have also noticed that. Maybe they were the banned members. I think bots can't comment on the forum itself. I have also noticed that there are guests. I wonder if they are the ones checking out the forum from search engines.

[Sam]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6774 ... s-with-php

Using the HTTP user agent is how websites identify bots it seems. Googlebot and others announce themselves as such.

When a user requests a webpage it would include something like(from Wikipedia):

Code: Select all

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7B405


whereas Googlebot's:

Code: Select all

 Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)


Might want to check out: http://www.howtogeek.com/114937/htg-exp ... ser-agent/

[Alexandoy]

Our forum detects bots and they list it down. There is a filter that checks on the IP and compares it with the registration so an unregistered browser is considered a robot although it is not that accurate.

[MtEverestNepal]

Our forum detects bots and they list it down. There is a filter that checks on the IP and compares it with the registration so an unregistered browser is considered a robot although it is not that accurate.

Hmm, At first I think that bot are online showing at the bottom on this forum are people who are using bot on forumcoin. But i am wrong and you are right.

[DreekLass]

Sometimes I am the guest on the forum, so I know that forums do count guests. I will revisit certain forums as a guest, because I can't be bothered to sign up an account with the forum.

[adssolsn]

i have never thought about it, but i believe technology is so updated these days anything is possible.

[Angie10]

Wow, you learn something everyday! So some of these people who try to beat the system are really wasting their time! I too have often seen them on some of the sites I use and wondered about them. I don't even know why they bother, to be honest!

[mobnepal]

They are the bots from search engines which keep on crawling your all the forum topics and post to make record of the them and update the record time to time. This is good as your site will be indexed rapidly if you have the content related to keyword.