Can bots cause damage to your forum?

Beverly Level X³

January 8, 2014, 6:01 pm

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Some bots are necessary such as the ones used by Google search to crawl and index your forum. But are there some types of bots that can be invasive or cause damage to your forum software? If so, how do you prevent these bots from getting onto your forum?

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Marlin

A search bot can't do any more than another guest could do. If they try to view a page without permissions, they will be sent to the sign up/register page.

13 years ago

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Jade

Spam bots can register and spam your forum with thousands of posts an hour until you are overwhelmed with so many posts you have no chohice but to shut down until you can get spam under control.

13 years ago

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Corzhens

I have joined some forums that tackled the issue of bots. In the discussions, I learned that bots can ruin your traffic because it is giving your site fake traffic numbers. If search engines can catch your site with lots of fake traffic then it can be suspended from being considered for inclusion in the search list. Some forum admins are very strict with bots that they manually block the IP address which is a tedious work.

8 years ago

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