We had someone recently describe why this is......

[dave nz]

Its weird I posted a cricket thread in the other sports.....within 5 mins the thread goes from 5 views to over 30 and there are 17+ guests. Prior to that there was only a few viewing.
Same thing happened last night when I posted my Aussie NBL hoops action.

We had someone recently describe what this is and why it happens, something about bots.

But I didn't fully understand it, anyone explain?

[bigbuck]

Originally Posted by dave nz

Its weird I posted a cricket thread in the other sports.....within 5 mins the thread goes from 5 views to over 30 and there are 17+ guests. Prior to that there was only a few viewing.
Same thing happened last night when I posted my Aussie NBL hoops action.

We had someone recently describe what this is and why it happens, something about bots.

But I didn't fully understand it, anyone explain?

I have had that with golf threads where I listed a sponsor or some key name that comes up when people do a google search. Also, yahoo and other search engines sent out alerts on subject matters that includes threads from various sites. That's what I suspect. I had a golf thread with over a 100 people in a few hours a few weeks ago.

[dave nz]

Originally Posted by bigbuck

I have had that with golf threads where I listed a sponsor or some key name that comes up when people do a google search. Also, yahoo and other search engines sent out alerts on subject matters that includes threads from various sites. That's what I suspect. I had a golf thread with over a 100 people in a few hours a few weeks ago.

Yep have seen that in the golf forum and with some of my threads in there too.
Makes sense about the search engine, but some guy here recently had a different theory about bots. I forget which member it was, maybe I'll find it in a search.

[dave nz]

Was Grizzly Joe

Thread here :

1000 members, 1700+ guests lol

[dave nz]

Grizzly Joe :


i've been on several forums where the "guests" are mostly Web Crawler bots, which is probably the case here:

Web crawler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, or Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters.

This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).

A Web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies."

you wouldn't believe how many yahoo slurp spiders and google bots there are out there everywhere lol...

it's kinda funny to see them at work...

for example, when you post up a new thread, then search for it's topic on google a short time later, there it is... how did it get there? a google bot found it while cruisin through the forum (as a guest) and processed it into google...

[Seanie Mac]

at some forums as soon as you hit submit thread, you instantly get between 5-10 views, those are just bots too. depending on how active or popular a forum is will dictate how many bots come to the site.

[bigbuck]

I just posted a thread last night on abu dhabi and it got a lot of hits to go with what you are talking about.

[GFootsXtreme]

it's a prelude to the matrix...the bots are like the machines that will hunt the humans...once they get a signal it's attack....lol wtf am i talking about