Rhiza Labs FluTracker Forum

Lately out of curiosity, I've been checking the "who is online" button. Does anyone know why the various "Bots" on the site show up as viewing or composing a private message? Also, this message comes up against some of the guest users but they would not have access to this feature as a guest right?.

Confused and uncomfortable.

P.S Right after posting this, the "Google Adsense [Bot]" was viewed as reading this post. The same "Bot" that is viewing private messages the same time as myself and a person I have been PM each other. No other users were viewing PM at this time. The "who is online" tool is an interesting way to track who is where.

Call me paranoid, because I am.

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I post my opinions, they may or may not differ from accepted officialdom, but they ARE protected under free speech. Please consult your doctor (or your own mind) should you choose to take this information further.

For example. The breakdown tells you the following. I did not show real users.


GAGuidestone79 Mon Jan 18, 2010 12:52 am Viewing who is online

MSN [Bot] Mon Jan 18, 2010 12:52 am Reading topic in Europe

Yahoo [Bot] Mon Jan 18, 2010 12:52 am Reading topic in North America

Google Adsense [Bot] Mon Jan 18, 2010 12:51 am Viewing private messages

Why is a [bot] viewing private messages?

They also post and reply to threads.

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I post my opinions, they may or may not differ from accepted officialdom, but they ARE protected under free speech. Please consult your doctor (or your own mind) should you choose to take this information further.

Google Adsense [Bot] Mon Jan 18, 2010 1:07 am Posting message in FluTracker Feedback

That's what I just did on this last post. So the [bot] seems to follow me around. Great ! I have a new friend. But I already have a big brother.......

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I post my opinions, they may or may not differ from accepted officialdom, but they ARE protected under free speech. Please consult your doctor (or your own mind) should you choose to take this information further.

I went to Who is Online and you were there. Are you following me?

LOL.... Could not resist stalking you.

Maybe this helps explain.....

"As a user you agree to any information you have entered to being stored in a database. While this information will not be disclosed to any third party without your consent, neither “Rhiza Labs FluTracker Forum” nor phpBB shall be held responsible for any hacking attempt that may lead to the data being compromised."

How convenient for google.

_________________
I post my opinions, they may or may not differ from accepted officialdom, but they ARE protected under free speech. Please consult your doctor (or your own mind) should you choose to take this information further.

It is far more likely you are just seeing incorrect displays for the bot. The bot has no way of bypassing normal password security in phpbb (the forum software). In fact anybody could fake a known bot but it wouldn't get them anywhere (other than possibly being able to read paid for content on subscription sites as the site thinks you are just indexing it).

In fact after a bit of digging, the status of the bot (or guest user for that matter) is updated everytime it tries to do something on the board even if it doesn't succeed - in reality the bot will either be sitting at a login prompt or a not authorized message. It will not be able to do anything it shouldn't.

FACT: EVERY word you type, EVERY image you submit is stored FOREVER to be used for any purpose those that have access to this information wish. Net privacy is fantasy and not reality based (to use someone's terminology, lol).
I assume these bots are used by the site managers to alert or block spam and other inconveniences.

The bots are not run by site managers. They are run buy their owners (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc). The phpbb software recognises many individual bots and names them in the display when it sees them on the site. Anyone can write a bot though and it would then normally just show up as guest unless it was common enough to be recognised.

By the way I run a small phpbb forum myself and I see these bots on the site all the time even though there is normally very little new content for them to index. They can't do anything they shouldn't and the code of phpbb is public.

I see

The Google AdSense bot by the way reads the public messages and then tells the Google adserver what type of ads to serve at the top of the page. At the moment I see:
Ads by Google

Avian Flu Humans

CDC Flu Pandemic

Swine Flu Cases

Current Flu Outbreak

Bird Flu News
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If we were to start talking about teeth whitening in a few threads then Google will start showing ads for that. There seems to be an epidemic of teeth whitening ads at the moment so that should be an easy one to trigger. Which reminds me I must phone my dentist to book a routine checkup as it's that time again.