Forum Robots

[Ron Party]

Not sure where to ask, so I'm posting in this section of the site.

When I log in the software tells me by numbers how many members are on line and it also includes a number for "robots". What are robots?

 

[RayDunzl]

Software.

http://www.robotstxt.org/

 

[amirm]

As Ray's link says, they are "crawlers" that walk the entire Internet to build up a database of what they want. In the case of major search engines like Google, that data is used in search and displayed as such. In the case of other "bots," who knows what they are doing. Some may be research bots for university and other research, others for heaven knows what.

Other forum software tends to include them in "visitor" count, inflating that number.