So. We have bots (Yahoo ones, I believe) crawling our site (Twilight of the Force). 75 82 89 113 122 135 of them right now.

Is there a way to stop it? We're on an IPBfree hosted board, although the same thing has happened - although not this severe - on Wydan, an SMF board.


EDIT: 101 now.

Um.... maybe requiring an email validation?

Or is there anyway to get in one of those "type in the following code in the image" things?

They're not able to sign up at the moment. It's a little jarring to see 135 of them as "guests" on at once. It throws the stats off-balance.

I wouldn't block them. The Yahoo and Google bots are good. It just means that people are searching for a topic that's somehow related to your board. I forgot how it works but the more times you come up in a search, the higher you climb on the pages. Someone feel free to correct me.

I believe it is the more sites are linking to you/visits you get from them, the higher you go.

There's really nothing you can do about it. And yahoo/google and other search engine spiders can't really do any harm. They just crawl through your forums to get your listed in their search engine. At times here on RPG-D we had the same ammounts of spiders on at the same time.

This happend to me once. I ended up creating a new site beacuse I had no idea how to get rid of them. And I still dont.

If they're not bothering anyone, I would leave them alone. I had them once on a site and didn't know what they were and it freaked me out as I watched the numbers rise.

But people have said the same thing: those are good bots. It's the ones who actually register that are the bad ones. ;)

I think it was just a one-off event; when they have returned there has been no more than two. It was just shocking to see the rate climb so high so fast.

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