What is a spider?

[Eva]

Sometimes I take a look on the part of the forum where I can see who is on-line. I see the names of the people who are on-line and what they are currently viewing. Also I see people who are not logged in (guests) and what they are viewing. But the I also see things like Slurp Spider, etc. Are these searchengines? Or what are they? And what is their function? Is it a good or a bad thing that they are on the forum?

Eva

[DaveM]

Some search engines use "spider" programs to search through web sites and discover keywords and URLs which eventually make it onto the search engine. I believe there are others that actually create accounts and log into sites (those wavy letters you have to type in on some sites are an attempt to block them). Presumably some of the latter are not well-intentioned. Hopefully the Boss here has more details.

[ponytail]

No wonder I hate spiders. Even the electronic ones are evil.:mad:

[NinasSpaceChild]

Generally, I think they are designed to create spam. We have a lot of trouble with them on eddi reader's and Nina Simone's boards.

[NinasSpaceChild]

I just had a look. There are 13 people looking at the board now. Me, DavidUK, one guest and 10 spiders. Scary.

[Eva]

Some search engines use "spider" programs to search through web sites and discover keywords and URLs which eventually make it onto the search engine.

But that's a good thing, right? I mean, that is what makes that if you type "Janis" in a search engine, it will bring you to this site. Or am I wrong here?

Eva

[John L]

A spider is also known as a bot. It is a indexing program that crawls the internet and harvests data. Some do collect e-mail addresses for spam, most are indexing for search engines.

The way this board is configured, no one's e-mail address is accessible by spiders (or by humans if they don't have the necessary security credentials to get that far into the server). Unfortunately, those of us that have e-mail addresses in clear do get some spam from that, but it comes with the territory.

Personally, my suggestion would be to ignore the spiders.

[DaveM]

Get 'em off me! Get 'em off me!

[Eva]

Thank you for the clarification. (is that English?)

Eva