that this Forum site receives a good deal of traffic from "guests" throughout a 24 hour timeframe. over the night there were guest activity from Russia & China! So i wonder - are these servers that somehow ping themselves into this network or whats the deal?
go up top of this page and click on LIST ALL USERS to see the activity.
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I am no longer part of the oppressed, evil workforce of Kroger! Can you say "Hallelujah"
They are web crawlers that crawl sites for search engine optimazation, for the most part. I have ran some fairly large forums and those are 90% of the 'large' number of guests you see on at any given time.
Some larger, paid, bulletin boards such as Vbulletin actually can mostly distinguish from the bunch.
They just follow link after link on webpages gathering as much information as they can so when someone types something into Google or w/e, it can give more results that are more relevant.
However, as I said before, I would wager a large portion are spambots. Having also administered a few forums, I saw loads of accounts from 1 IP with formulaic names, or accounts with CHEAPONLINEPHARM or something like that in their emails. Most of them don't post, so I don't know what their purpose is. Their IPs will trace to places like Russia, China, Singapore, India, mostly Asian countries (although they could be using a proxy). If you run across a bot, you can find a few sites like http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ or http://www.stopforumspam.com/ to easily confirm/deny whether or not they are bots.
