Who (or what?) is user "Google [Bot]"?? *PIC*

[Johan]

Today I noticed by coincidence, at the bottom of the forum homepage, where a short list of some of the loged-in members is displayed, that an unknown (to me!) user was logged in and shown in grey, named --> Google [Bot]

Does anyone know who/what that is??

See a screen-dump of the login-page with this strange user shown at the bottom --> http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/2963/f ... 220113.jpg

Johan

[RealBlackStuff]

It's just the Google Spider, 'crawling' the website.
It only pops up for a short time, then disappears again.
I think it does this several times a day.

[ArtShapiro]

It's just the Google Spider, 'crawling' the website.

Sure, "spiders" crawl around websites unless inhibited by various site settings. But the fact that it's a registered user certainly seems curious to me.

Art

[rkawakami]

For the curious : There's currently about 20 bots/spiders that have recently crawled through the site; 11 of them have done so today. They have been granted access to the board via the phpBB admin panel and therefore show up as "registered" users.

[Ormu]

Install user-agent changer to Firefox -> Select Googlebot -> Have fun with your new identity.