XF 2.1 Current Visitors

[WhiskeyMac]

Can anyone shed any light on what "Robot:Facebook" means in this view of current visitors

 

[Dnyan]

Robots are machines which come to your website and reads the content for various purposes.

Generally fb bots do visit when someone do share a link at fb or when maximum visitors do click on link shared by you at FB.

 

[WhiskeyMac]

I have a link on the forum to a FB page...so that must have attracted the FB bot to search the Forum..?

But is the bot programmed to actually access the "forum list"?

 

[Dnyan]

Yes bots do actually search the pages, crawl it and look at its content.

There are many types of bots which actually do visits the websites to grab the data posted there and used for various purposes.

FB bot crawl the page and creates the preview which we see on FB.

You can search for robots on google to get more information about them.

 

[WhiskeyMac]

Are there any techniques / add-ons available for XF forum that can block all bots from accessing any part of the forum.... ?

If it is guaranteed that they only have "Guest" access then that is fine.....

 

[Dnyan]

Bots only have guest access only.

To block all and make forum only for members you can make that by giving access to all forums to member only.

In this case forum becomes private and no one can access it, if they are not member.

 

[jeb35]

If you block the forum from nonmembers then you won't get any new members from say google indexing.

 

[Dnyan]

Blocking all means, no indexing of forum pages on Search engines because search engines do access data and index it via bots only.

So private forum can be access by those only who knows the web address and have account on your Forum.

Not all bots are harmful but some bots can increase load on server which slow the web.

 

[WhiskeyMac]

I was worried that a bot especially one from FB (!) would be lifting private data such as email / phone numbers from from my private forum....but i have no guest access allowed at all so that has put my mind at rest.

Thank you all for replying.

 

[Dnyan]

To check what is scrap after visiting to specific url, you can use facebook og image debug and check for what data it had scrapped.

If the data is not on private only forum, it will have access to all.

 

[WhiskeyMac]

Sorry Dnyan - I am not sure I understand what you are recommending... ?

 

[Dnyan]

When you visit your forum or thread as a guest.

The all things on page which you see as a guest are viewable to bot.