[OldGuy]

I have noticed that other than registered members, there is also a list of spiders and bots logged in on ForumCoin. They change, but there are almost always 3 or more logged in.
For example: Registered users: Baidu [Spider], Bing [Bot], Google [Bot], UpDown [Bot], Yandex [Bot]

Thet are listed on the home page as "registered users" but none of them appear in the members list.

So I am wondering,
what is the difference?
Do they serve the same purpose?
What exactly are they doing?

[skysnap]

Spiders were developed for crawling search data and making connections. Bots are general purpose, from automation, collecting data, executing etc. Think of it like spider being archanides, insects being insects.. its like what spider can do is possible for bots but spider has it's own class and usage.

[CyberFreak]

The difference between a spider or a bot i think is non existent. I think it is purely down to whatever term a company prefers to use. At the end of the day they are automated software that visits websites like ours and "indexes" it into their search engine if they are a search engine or performs other actions on the site in an automated way. The updown bot purely is a check by another server to check that the site is online an accessible. The bots do not appear on the memberlist but they do have accounts here.

The reason why our software detects them is to allow specific control over what known bots can do and what individual bots can see and so. For example, we could hide things from guests but still allow search engines to index them. We could also allow certain bots to only index certain areas. It allows alot more control then just treating them as guests like logged out users.

[raaman]

As per my understanding, I think both the spider and the bot do the same functions, but, bots are designed with an evil design in mind.

[kat82]

If my account can be made spider prevailed I can view everything else other members can't see 🙈

[Tendz]

Spider is used by search engines to scan your website pages. Bots visit websites and do tasks automatically.

[Fergal]

OldGuy congratulations on posting a topic of the week. Sending ForumCoin now

[raaman]

If my account can be made spider prevailed I can view everything else other members can't see 🙈

Is it so? From where did you get this information?

[germainebull]

There is only a slight difference, old man. Bot is a general name for a digital person.

Spider is a special type of bot that crawls websites to collect data. It works at the request of the search engine.

There are other bots that are destructive. They come to steal data or damage the system.

If you have a website, set up a robot.txt file. This tells the spider which crawlers to crawl and read. Don't let all the digital visitors crawl it randomly.