Do we have a Site Admin Guru?

We seem to have 68 guests or Bots?

What are they doing?

Not a Guru

Bots and Crawlers are sent out from the search engines (Google, Yahoo etc) to look through your site to determine the ranking of sites as they appear in there search engines.

When bots are looking through a site, they are not looking to determine the ranking of the site they are on, but to look at links in that site to other sites. It is those other sites that gain the ranking. The more hits a site gets as the bots visit differents sites the more the ranking increases. The further up the ranking on the search engines, the more likely a user will click to visit your site, and you will be able to sell them something.

Because it is such a big industry, sellers want to get links on your site back to there site. However, you can only post on the forum if you are a registered user. So part of the industry is to have servers that's sole purpose is to visit sites with a view to registering and posting a link to there clients sites. Its call Spam.

This site gets spammed a lot every day. The new users get created, but not authenticated. It can be difficult to determine between real new users and generated ones.

So probably, most of the visitors are spammers.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the reply Roger, well explained.
Authentication nowadays seems to use “ I am not a robot” or chapcha method, I assume our forum software does not provide that.
The bots etc appear to inflate the visits to a topic but not the views of images.
Don’t suffer spam, as Gmail is good at filtering that out, but it seems to me big % of IP traffic is pointless crap...

I think they usually create new topics.
Like most of things, anti spam has to cost.

Spammers have reached new levels of expertise recently. It's amazing really but worrying. (From another site I'm on.) The bots can be incredibly life like now and the sheer volume of it is mental.

I got listed as spam on this site and Roger helped me unspam myself. (Thanks Roger! ) An unfortunate side effect of all this spam detection that's needed now.

Or maybe I'm a bot but I'm so lifelike even I can't tell. Bugger!

It all makes sense now! We are in the Matrix ....