[HuNtS]

recently, i browsed the "who's online" feature of our website... at the time the forum statistics listed 14 members online, and 184 guests... upon looking through the "guests" i noticed a majority (and i mean majority) were one of 3 things, a "yahoo slurp spider" and "msn bot spider" or a "google spider"... there's hundreds of these things searching through out forums at any given time, out of those 184 "guests" there was maybe 15 ACTUAL guests, the rest were these spiders... now i know they're "needed" for some of the advertisements that pop things up by keyword, but does there have to be so many? and do they have any kind of negative impact to the forum at all? like anything similar to if we'd have too many members online at one time? just an observation, so lmk, cuz i'm interested.

[Ryan_P]

right now its 133 search bots, 25 guests and like 14 members

[mspainter]

We need guests to join the forum.

[Dooms]

Basically, they're a good thing as long as they don't get out of hand. We can cut down on them if need be or even cut them out entirely if we choose, it only takes a few simple changes to do so. Right now they aren't overloading anything or attracting the bad kinds of bots, so they're ok.

[kant_think]

But what's the point of them?