Yahoo! Slurp Spider? MSNBot Spider?

[Mimi]

Just watched the page "Currently active users" for the very first time and saw a long list of "Yahoo! Slurp Spider"s or "MSNBot Spider"s - What's that? Doesn't really sound good - but perhaps it's harmless nevertheless???

Mimi :confused:

[Roady]

Mimi,

Someone like Paularoid, Amy or Redjack can better answer this question but just to ease your mind, to my knowledge they are good. If you have a website you want them. These little robots go around to websites gathering information and that information is what makes up the data base of a search engine like google, msn or yahoo.

Like when you search "Janis Ian" she comes up first. If you search Seventeen,this website comes up about 20th.

There is something websites can do to increase rank but I'll leave that to the experts.

So no need to worry, neither Janis, her members or her website are under attack.

[Mimi]

Thanks, Roady! I supposed it was something like that even if spiders aren't my favourite animals... :D

Mimi

[paularoid]

Mimi,

Someone like Paularoid, Amy or Redjack can better answer this question but just to ease your mind, to my knowledge they are good. If you have a website you want them. These little robots go around to websites gathering information and that information is what makes up the data base of a search engine like google, msn or yahoo.

Like when you search "Janis Ian" she comes up first. If you search Seventeen,this website comes up about 20th.

There is something websites can do to increase rank but I'll leave that to the experts.

So no need to worry, neither Janis, her members or her website are under attack.
Actually JohnL would be the -real- expert at this but basically what you say is true - BUT - (always one of those now isn't there :p ) it should be noted that it -could- be that not all those 'bots' are harmless. -Some- of them could be address harvesters put out by spammers that will harvest every email address they can and use them for building up a database of email addresses to send spam to. One way to address this issue is to post an address with an obvious (to the reader) part to remove,... like this:
paularoid@(REMOVE)gmail.com

[Roady]

I realize spambots aren't something you want but are the bots from places like msn and google capable of inflicting damage? Also don't spambots have to register or otherwise have access to the membership list to be able to get email addresses and other user info?

I only allow registered members to access our membership list. And haven't had a spambot or spammer in months since I added a step to the regisration process. I got rid of the feature that shows the name of the newest member after a few xx rated user names appeared.

[paularoid]

I realize spambots aren't something you want but are the bots from places like msn and google capable of inflicting damage? Also don't spambots have to register or otherwise have access to the membership list to be able to get email addresses and other user info?
The bots from places like MSN, Google, Yahoo etc. are probably just fine. They're only doing as you described before, gathering info for their search engines. The addresses I was referring to were/are those that are posted within the body of a message, like if I told everyone to send me a message to myemailaddress@cybernautica.com for whatever reason. The spambots will cruise through the messages looking for addresses like that to harvest and that is why I suggest scrambling them in an obvious way. ie. paularoid@-REMOVETORESPOND-gmail.com.


I only allow registered members to access our membership list. And haven't had a spambot or spammer in months since I added a step to the regisration process. I got rid of the feature that shows the name of the newest member after a few xx rated user names appeared.
See previous statement(s). It's the addresses that users might enter into the body of a message that they'll harvest.