are we being tracked

[nickkieffer1]

I have seen "people online" at the bottom of the page showing members and visitors viewing the site BING (bot) who is this is the site being monitored by a BOT system . Nick

[PerHansson]

As long as we don't mention the 'C' word, I hope the apolitical 'side effects' of the forum won't be affected. I am sure there are more technically astute members whom can explain why!? Needless to say all communications are monitored!

[Ben]

Hi Nick

I don't know the answer, but since I am moderator of the forum perhaps I should.

It does need to know who you are as you have to log in. The club does not monitor or analyse who is logged in or posting or such.

I'll ask our webmaster to comment.

Ben

[fushion julz]

I would guess that it is a Bing tracker to catalog the site for the search engine...

[nickkieffer1]

I does seem strange as some days it is there and others not. it shows up as a member not visitor I presume others have noticed . Nick

[Ben]

I didn't really know what you were going on about! But I have just seen it for the first time.

Curious

[fushion julz]

From Microsoft site on Bing:

Bingbot is our standard crawler and handles most of our crawling needs each day. Bingbot uses a couple of different user agent strings.

https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/wh ... e-8c184ec0

[fushion julz]

and...If you(we) don't want the crawlers to be interrogating any particular thing:

You can use a robots.txt file to control which directories and files on your web server a Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP)-compliant search engine crawler (aka a robot or bot) is not permitted to visit, that is, sections that should not be crawled. It is important to understand that this not by definition implies that a page that is not crawled also will not be indexed. To see how to prevent a page from being indexed see this topic.

https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/?topicid=cb7c31ec

Note that removing a page entirely from a search index means that a blank or 404 page is returned if anyone searches for the contect or titles. Not really desirable as it would seem thatthe FOC is non-existant!

[Ben]

Our website editor, Rich Miller, has replied to me thus

Bingbot is the Microsoft search engine crawler, which will be indexing forum pages to save to its database. This is an automated process, which helps search engine users to browse search engine query results, directly to forum postings and articles.

Our phpBB forum allows search engine crawlers, as did our previous forum.

Hope this helps.

So it seems to be a bit of web stuff not to be too worried about.

Hope this helps.

[nickkieffer1]

I always thought Bigbot was someone who ate to many pies .Thanks for the info Ben
Nick

[Scott Pett]

The Indexing Bots are mostly harmless and provide useful information to the search engines which allow people to find Fairey related information via the Internet.

However, most of the so called "Guests" are SpamBots on French machines (and other places), attempting to register onto the Forum and then dump loads of stupid messages on us. If you remember, we had a spate of them shortly after we setup the new forum. The SpamBots were able to successfully work through the Captur images used during the registration process and were able to create forum accounts and post messages.

Which is why we switched the Captur system to a new mechanism which the Bots have, so far, not been able to get past. Although they keep trying. With a more robust moderation system in place for new users we have remained largely Spam free but it does mean that newly registered users will see a delay before their posts are visible on the Discussion Boards and of course, more work for the Moderators and Administrators.

[nickkieffer1]

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