A member of my has on many occasions said the bots are doing stuff.

He happened to get this shot, have a look, what exactly is this bot doing?

Can they change passwords?

Attached Images

modifypw.jpg (196.1 KB, 9 views)

Did you see this as the admin account ? I'd think it would show a "no permission" error.

--------------------

Post your URL and a link to your vb.com username here to get full access.

Add our Facebook Blog, Group and LinkedIn group.. Thanks

Stay up to date by installing our Tool Bar

Yeah and you can see sending pm, emails etc. as well, but it isnt actually doing this, its just accessing a change password and other pages.

--------------------
India Travel Forum | India Travel Directory | India Photo Gallery | Free Travel Directory

lol, well do you happen to have a user with that username?

--------------------

lol.. I wonder what would happen if a user signed up as "Google Spider"

Wonder what the online.php would look like.

--------------------

Post your URL and a link to your vb.com username here to get full access.

Add our Facebook Blog, Group and LinkedIn group.. Thanks

Stay up to date by installing our Tool Bar

If he did it would be in blue, like the rest of the members. Could this have something to do with your robots.txt file?

--------------------
My Updated Blog

I have been watching those bots now, I have seen the movie Irobot and know what their game plan is.

I even saw one in a hidden forum on a thread where the accessability for viewing is not to bots or guests etc!

How do they get in their then?

I have Brandons default robots.txt file in place, however if your forum resides in the root directory do remove the /forums/ tag infront of the files where you dont want the robot going.

Also, what I added is this, and I'm winging it here coz there's no instruction book for this that I have found.

The hidden forums when viewing have a file name in the URL goes like this /f22/ so I put f22* in the robots text file hoping the bots dont go to hidden forums/threads.

Correct me if I'm wrong, however offer me some advice how to prevent (via robotstxt file) a bot going to these places including hidden forums.

Well bots don't have access to private forums unless you let them, so there's no need to worry about your robots.txt file. If you don't want those messages appearing in Google, then you would have to edit your robots.txt file.

That should block the whole f22 directory.

Thanks, I'll stick that in there, trust no robot!

If a guest can't see the hidden forums, neither will bots ;)

--------------------

Post your URL and a link to your vb.com username here to get full access.

Add our Facebook Blog, Group and LinkedIn group.. Thanks

Stay up to date by installing our Tool Bar