Private Forum

[Basschop]

I am new to setting up forums.

My needs are for a private forum for employees at my company.

The content cannot be accessed by search engines. I know I can block access to folks trying to get on the forum (if they were to happen upon it) just by requiring people to register as well as not allowing 'guests' to view the forum.

What I don't know is if the web crawlers and robots that mine data for search engines can still see this data even if it is blocked by passwords and entry requirements.  Will I have any issues with this using SMF?

Thanks for your help.

[JBlaze]

Bots and spiders have the same access privileges as guests. So as long as you disable guests from viewing the forum, it should be ok. You can also add a robots.txt file to deny access for bots to crawl the pages.