bots or something on my forum

[Matt.B]

hi,

i keep having these bots or something visiting my forum

Guest  (67.218.116.134)
Online mattb (184.96.142.224)
Guest (67.195.111.251)
Guest (67.218.116.163)

like guests everytime how do i make them stop

[Coburn64]

What's wrong with them? They could just be visitors, or GoogleBot and related indexers indexing your forums.

There's nothing to worry about - if you want, force guests to register/login and that'll solve that problem.

[Matt.B]

google bots think what they are taking my forum info then distributing it across the web D:

but these bots come in packs like 4 or 5 i see other forums don't have them

[YogiBear]

They're Yahoo spidering or crawling through your pages so as to tell people on the net you're there. As Coburn says, perfectly harmless but it you want a hidden forum then force Guests/Visitors to log-in thus setting all the Boards invisible unless they do.

[Matt.B]

how? and will that make guests to register and become members?

[rd]

how? and will that make guests to register and become members?

Bots aren't real people, they are software ran in external servers that crawl your site for information and many of them publish that information in search engines. Depending on many factors if your information gets published in search engines then you might get real visitors and they might become members.

[Matt.B]

hidden forum then force Guests/Visitors to log-in thus setting all the Boards invisible unless they do.

how do i do that i mean

[YogiBear]

Admin > Boards > Modify > untick the Guest boxes.