Bots...

[BlessedDisciple]

I have regularly noticed that the number of actual forum members online at any time is far surpassed by the number of "visitors". (Currently I see that the number of members online is 50 and non-member visitors is 6,129) From what I have read online, this large number of visitors is almost certainly mostly an army of bots (Of course, I could be wrong about this forum -- maybe there are just a lot of visitors who are browsing without loggin in).

Concerning bots, I've noticed that various forums on the internet use a variety of effective tools to check for and eliminate them. What is Christian Forums doing concerning this?

 

[Jerry N.]

I have regularly noticed that the number of actual forum members online at any time is far surpassed by the number of "visitors". (Currently I see that the number of members online is 50 and non-member visitors is 6,129) From what I have read online, this large number of visitors is almost certainly mostly an army of bots (Of course, I could be wrong about this forum -- maybe there are just a lot of visitors who are browsing without loggin in).

Concerning bots, I've noticed that various forums on the internet use a variety of effective tools to check for and eliminate them. What is Christian Forums doing concerning this?

If you search (duckduckgo) for “Are bots posting on forums?” Your post comes up on the first page.

There seems to be good bots and bad bots. Your post was probably found by a good bot and added it to the search. Most bots are just mining for data to train AI and for marketing research of trends. Bad bots are looking for personal data and pretending to be human. Bots account for a large portion of traffic. I would also like to know what CF is doing about it.

 

[Chesterton]

I have regularly noticed that the number of actual forum members online at any time is far surpassed by the number of "visitors". (Currently I see that the number of members online is 50 and non-member visitors is 6,129) From what I have read online, this large number of visitors is almost certainly mostly an army of bots (Of course, I could be wrong about this forum -- maybe there are just a lot of visitors who are browsing without loggin in).

I'm not saying this for certain, and of course there are bots, but it doesn't seem unreasonable that there could be over 6K people browsing at any given time. There are 8 billion people on the planet, after all. And I've been around long enough to remember when CF was the 9th largest forum on the net. Ninth might not sound impressive, but that was up there with places like Reddit, back before newer forms of social media really took off. Plus I'm sure some members occasionally browse around here without logging on in order to see if there's anything worth logging on about.

Concerning bots, I've noticed that various forums on the internet use a variety of effective tools to check for and eliminate them. What is Christian Forums doing concerning this?

Just in case you don't know, there is a private sub-forum where you could ask about this - Questions about CF