[OldGuy]

There is a line that changes with each passing minute on the home page. This is a sample of what was posted as I logged in just now:

"In total there are 48 users online :: 8 registered, 4 hidden (or bots) and 36 guests (based on users active over the past 15 minutes)"

What exactly are the bots and what is the purpose?

[CyberFreak]

They are good bots that get detected by our forum software. These are typically search bots such as Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu etc that are viewing content here to index for their search engines. Some of the bots are from Google to view content to serve ads related to the content of the page. One bot is actually an external service that every minute checks the uptime of the site to alert me if it is down.

[OldGuy]

Thank you for the clear explanation. It helps to understand the overall functions of the site.

[ladyninja]

I have also wondered what those are. Thanks for the clarification!

[junrose123]

Thanks for sharing us the information, I really don't have also an idea about that.

[kat82]

Yea well explained thank you.

[oliver909]

Looks like CyberFreak covered it pretty well, but to add a bit more context: most of those “bots” are automated crawlers from search engines or uptime monitors. They just scan pages to keep search results updated or check that the forum is still reachable. They aren’t users in the normal sense and they’re not doing anything harmful. Pretty much every forum or blog has them in the background all the time.