Big Brother's Presence On The Forums

[dafels]

Idk if anyone has ever questioned these bots, but there's a lot of bots surveilling the forums and collecting data from jorbtar about the customers in who knows where data centers. You didn't make the website https for years, but yet you let bots collect data from your hard work when they are benefitting from you. Remove them

[Nightdawg]

I sure do HOPE TO HEAR SOME NVIDIA NEWS, I AM VERY CURIOUS ABOUT THEIR PRODUCTS, ESPECIALLY THE LATEST GPUS AND DRIVERS. I LIKE GRAPHICS AND STUFF

my personal e-mail address is fredrik@dolda2000.com btw, WOULD BE COOL TO RECEIVE SOME NEWS hahaaaaha

now we wait

[Apocoreo]

HOT SINGLEs are building a RAM outside your PALISADE

[VDZ]

Idk if anyone has ever questioned these bots, but there's a lot of bots surveilling the forums and collecting data from jorbtar about the customers in who knows where data centers. You didn't make the website https for years, but yet you let bots collect data from your hard work when they are benefitting from you. Remove them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

This has been a thing since the 90s. It's what causes sites to be found via web searches. If bots are kicked out (well, the ones polite enough to identify themselves - there are always plenty of hidden crawlers which are indistinguishable from normal visitors) the pages they are denied access to will no longer appear in search results. Websites are essentially held hostage by the likes of Google - either you accept them inspecting every inch of your site, or your site effectively doesn't exist anymore except for people who already know about it.

[MagicManICT]

This has been a thing since the 90s. It's what causes sites to be found via web searches. If bots are kicked out (well, the ones polite enough to identify themselves - there are always plenty of hidden crawlers which are indistinguishable from normal visitors) the pages they are denied access to will no longer appear in search results. Websites are essentially held hostage by the likes of Google - either you accept them inspecting every inch of your site, or your site effectively doesn't exist anymore except for people who already know about it.

You should probably look up what some of those search engine bots are used for. At least two on that list, possibly a 3rd and 4th, are purely to sell hits to advertisers that then generate clickbait, ad spam, and other things that a respectable forum admin has to clean up. Those specialized web crawlers exist because using more generic search engines just doesn't generate the information targeting needed by advertisers.

And yes, I've tried to find out who is running some of the crawler bots. There exists information from the phpBB forums and documentation on how to deal with the ones that just deal in ad spam.