Some times the forum shows 1 or 2 members online but 60+ guests and these are not known bots bc those are filtered out.
BUT what I did not know, a lot of companies are having their own in-house bots they use to scrape the net for information. So basically these are commercial companies selling what they find.
There really is not way to find out what is what without undue work involved - I for my part do not care much, we are not writing any stuff thats interesting outside the biker world - and anything written in the DEV section is invisible to bots.
The only way to avoid this data harvesting is to make the forum "members only" meaning one has to register to be able to read. I would not mind that either as we are already pretty exclusive - however in that case even the google bot would not be able to read our messages and that may be detrimental for legitimate traffic.
BUT what I did not know, a lot of companies are having their own in-house bots they use to scrape the net for information. So basically these are commercial companies selling what they find.
There really is not way to find out what is what without undue work involved - I for my part do not care much, we are not writing any stuff thats interesting outside the biker world - and anything written in the DEV section is invisible to bots.
The only way to avoid this data harvesting is to make the forum "members only" meaning one has to register to be able to read. I would not mind that either as we are already pretty exclusive - however in that case even the google bot would not be able to read our messages and that may be detrimental for legitimate traffic.
