MSN [bot] ?

[Marin85]

I have just noticed that "guy" under users browsing this forum. Is it normal for that thingy to appear as logged in the forum (though obviously uncovered as a bot)?

[JaneL]

Yes, it's one of the indexing agents that crawl the internet gathering info for Google, Yahoo!, MSN etc search engines. I have them hidden, but occasionally MSN's will be visible anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlebot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Msnbot

So far, we've been visited by bots from 16 different search engines. Most of them log in and out as they visit. Google, Yahoo! and MSN appear to stay logged in and dormant between scans.

FWIW, this isn't new. They've always been here - they just showed up in the admin panel as anonymous guests in the older version of the software.

[Marin85]

Ah, ok, thanks for your response. I just wanted to notify about that as I have never seen such thing before

Marin

[basketb]

Yes, it's one of the indexing agents that crawl the internet gathering info for Google, Yahoo!, MSN etc search engines. I have them hidden, but occasionally MSN's will be visible anyway...

To be honest, I find it a pity that you made them hidden (I know somebody complained, for whatever reasons didn't want to see them in the user list) but they are part of the on-line life and why not see them when they are here.