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Topic Started: Jul 17 2013, 02:45 PM (267 Views)
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When you have a ton of guests the majority of them are web crawlers. IP # 157.***.*** is one of the most prolific as of late. I believe it is the google crawler. You have Bing bots, Google bots, Amazon bots, Microsoft hosting and a plethora of others. Believe it or not the web crawlers can be of real benefit to your board, assuming you want to attract attention to your forums. They get everything they can and go everywhere they are allowed. All the data they gather is indexed and people who use google (or any search engine for that matter) may be sent to your forum when what they type into their search parameters is part of the indexed information. It has become surprisingly useful. If you used to type in anything associated with a invisionfree/zetaboards forum you were unlikely to get a hit but now those forums pop up a lot, many times on the first few pages of your search. If unsuccessful you can add "zetaboards" after your search request and get the data.

Web crawlers or "bots" cannot see anything the boards administrator doesn't allow them to see by the permissions he has set up. They may seem to follow you around but if the permissions don't allow for them to see it they can't. They try but all they see is an error message denying them access.

Some "bots" are programmed to make computer generated spam posts but again, they can't do it if the administrator doesn't allow "guests" to post.
Some "bots" are programmed to actually register as a member of a board but they can't do it if the administrator has set it so he has to approve their membership. Invisionfree/Zetaboards has a CAPTCHA program that weeds out those bots trying to register.

"Too many hits per hour" doesn't apply to Invisionfree/Zetaboards. Its the paid forums that charge you by the amount of hits you get. If you get a lot of hits those services want you to pay for a more expensive package. It can be a real problem on Invision Power Board but Invisionfree/Zetaboards could care less.

Invisionfree/Zetaboards gets their money from ads. They get paid by how many times you "click" on the board. By that I mean every single time you click anything they get paid. You would think they would be rich but it barely pays enough to keep these boards up and running. All their support is done by volunteers and often times small issues aren't addressed for ages. They don't get paid by the amount of guests on your forums, just how many times members "click" on something.
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