I read several online forums, and a question has arisen regarding guests and bots, which usually outnumber registered users.
How can we tell whether a guest is a real but unregistered person/visitor, just browsing, or a bot doing 'something'?
Part 2, I suppose, is what might a bot be doing? We have never suffered from malicious posts or anything like that. We are not aware of any forum posts being reproduced elsewhere.
Most trolls behave like bots anyway.
Bots spam to sell product. Trolls spam to sell ideas. Or just for fun.
The bots could just be search engines crawling the site. You could probably get a idea from the server logs.
Most "guests" probably don't want to participate in the discussions. They will just be searching for existing answers.
If they are not allowed to post until a full user, how can you know they are there as surely there is no indication to the average user, only the site admin. If people are using it or using bots to get data of some kind, how can you prevent it? Brian
In message , Brian Gaff writes
With the two I have in mind, 'Powered by phpBB? Forum Software ? phpBB Limited', there is a link labelled 'Who Is Online', which is available to all registered users, and quite possibly unregistered users - I don't know, as, being registered, but not forum owner or moderator, I only see what is available to all registered users.
Clicking the link shows a list of everyone visiting the forum at that moment, listed by their user name or 'Guest'.
I don't want to prevent it. I just wonder who these visitors are. They could be real people, just with a passing interest, or could be some kind of bot. I just wondered, really.
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