Spiders!

[mixtymotions]

UGH! 6 Yahoo Slurp Spiders and 1 MSNBot Spider are crawling all through our posts! Who/what ARE they?

[John L]

They index the entire site and improve our search engine stack rankings.

They are not dangerous spiders, or poisonous spiders. They are beneficial spiders.

Please remember that it is bad luck to kill a spider in your house. You need to gently move it outside instead.

[NinasSpaceChild]

Which are the kind that create spam on forums? I didn't know there were different kinds.

[John L]

but different types of forums.

Some automated scripts could be used to insert adds in forums...that's why we have the rather convoluted sign up procedure that we do on this forum. Since you cannot post without having registered, those evil spiders are defeated.

Some spiders can be used to "Harvest" e-mail addresses from the Web (and usenet) , which is why we take such pains to keep e-mail addresses hidden from the regular web. IF you have EVER had your e-mail address appear in clear in USEnet, you are probably STILL paying for it (as am I).

The spiders from MSN, Yahoo, and Google are all indexing spiders for search engines. Strictly speaking, when someone refers to "Spiders" on the web these are what they are referring to. While someone could use a webcrawler to identify and insert spam into forums, a geek (or at least THIS geek) would refer to those as a "Script".

[Dee]

Could that explain all the weird sign up names that never post anything?

Signed,

Clueless Non Geek

[mixtymotions]

Please remember that it is bad luck to kill a spider in your house. You need to gently move it outside instead.

After gently moving the spider outside, is it then permissable to stomp on it and no longer considered bad luck to do so? :eek: I've heard that it is bad luck to kill a cricket in the house...be aware that they will gnaw the upholstery right off your furniture or nibble on the hems of draperies if they are indoors too long.

And thank you, John - good to know the lurking spiders here are beneficial!