Do search bots (e.g. google) count as a "view"?

[steve_aust]

My old forum board used to count search bots (mostly google but there are so many now, mostly from China and Russia) as "views".

Do these "bots" increment "view" counts on Xenforo forums?

I do know in my friends Xenforo forum, in the "Members Online Now" (showing members & guests online), a lot of the guests are indeed search bots.
How do I know?
When he clicks on guest IP addresses, they are in China or Russia, and his low traffic forum would have no interest to anyone in China in Russia - plus some of the IP addresses resolve to "search" in their address

 

[tenants]

The views from China and Russia will likely be a high % of spam bots if your site is not China / Russia relevant (they don't just attempt the registration form, but look for relevant content).

I believe every visit (from Spam Bots / Search Engine Spiders / Users) count as views, even spiders coming back from Twitter/ Facebook (although, having said that, I know XenForo has isRobot to detect known search engine spiders, I'm not sure if it uses this to avoid views)

You can use something like Awstats, and look at how many visitor came from search engines (these will be real users)
The direct users could be loyal users / other (spam bots / spiders)

You can also look through your server access logs. Then for any given IP address, just Google it (both spiders and a high % of spam bots are often indexed)

There are probably better 3rd party packages for displaying visitor info other than Awstats, but most people have Awstats readily availably via CPanel