TOPIC: Guest Bots

Hey Y'all,<br /><br />Some of you may have noticed a large number of "Guests" on the forum, who frequently seem to be viewing member's profiles. We noticed it too. Since we are pretty sure it is internet search bots, we changed a setting on the forum so that your contact info in your profile is only visible to registered members. The bots will still show as viewing the profile, but they won't actually be able to view your email address.<br /><br />Just thought you might like to know. 

I noticed - and think you guys are doing a great job taking care of this forum and the people using it.<br /><br />THANKS!   :headbang: :hello2: :wav:

But but...where will I get my herbal viagra offers now?

:sign10:  Henwy you too funny.<br /><br />I have to admit the first time I saw a "guest" was reading my profile, I got a little paranoid (More than my normal state, lol).<br /><br />Les, you da man!  :icon_thumleft: er,ah.....the female......er WO-man!<br /><br />Thanks for the change and letting us know.

Ah, so that's what's happening.  I noticed the number of guests and just assumed traffic was increasing as Gen Con got closer. 

Many of them are legitimate guests, but some were bots. The "real" guests rarely view people's profiles.

I never knew you could see who is looking at your profile.  =|

Douglas,<br /><br />What it is, If you are logged in, on the bottom of the main page is the box that says how many users online their are. Next to that is a little image to the left.<br />If you click on the image, it takes you to a who's online.<br />And there you can see the pages everyone is viewing. For instance if you were looking at it, it would show you as 'viewing who's online'.<br /><br />Well we had  many 'guests' a day that were 'viewing (any given forum user name)'s profile'<br /><br />Spam bots were scanning them for email addresses to harvest.<br />So now the setting has been changed so that only logged in members can view profiles. So that should hopefully stop the spam bots.

As of right now the profiles are still veiwable as guests, so I'm just assuming its taking a while for the settings to change over. *shrugs* I dunno though, I'm no admin.

The profile page is still viewable by guests but the email address shows "hidden" for the value if you are a guest.<br /><br />Hope that makes sense.

Yeah, we'll be fine unless Richard Dawson comes around with candy cars hidden under his hat...