Controlling Guest Access

[newtoallthis]

XP SP3, SMF 2 RC5, Simple Portal 2.3.3

I've not enabled 'Allow guests to browse the forum'.

However, in Who's Online, I've got guests 'viewing the forum' and 'viewing profiles'. The IP's of the guests aren't associated with any of my members.

What do you think the problem may be?

[Arantor]

Spammers, regular people and/or search engines trying to browse the site. The fact that it's saying they are doesn't mean they are. Just means that's the URL they're trying to access. For performance it doesn't evaluate the permission of every user there and figure out if they could be at the URL they were logged as trying to access.

[newtoallthis]

Thank you for the reassurance.

[Arantor]

It's one of my pet hates in SMF that this is the case, actually, so much so that I once wrote a mod (that I don't have any more, oops) to log it so that if someone gets an error, that error is shown to me in the who's online page so that I know they didn't see anything they weren't supposed to.

But I can well imagine that it's confusing for someone who is newer to SMF.