Visitors (1 Viewer)

[Combat]

I've noticed a larger than usual number of visitors on the site recently. At one point today there were 35 on the General discussion and 25 on Honour Bound even though there were no new posts recently. Strange. Maybe I just never noticed it before.

 

[Gideon]

Could be spiders and bots crawling around. These are the critters that index website according to content to provide search engine rankings.

I see spikes on my site when they are crawling too.

 

[Peter Reuss]

We've been keeping an eye on it, and while there have been a lot of spiders around, the number of actual visitors is way up too! Right now there are 20 guests (12 spiders and 8 guests). Typically about half of the guests are spiders.

We talk to a lot of people who love the Forum but don't feel comfortable posting. We welcome anyone to come on board and have something to say.

 

[kilted vampire]

To the uninitiated, What is a "spider"?

 

[Wraith]

To the uninitiated, What is a "spider"?

Small 8 legged creature that spins webs and eats flies.

Always happy to help.

Simon

 

[OzDigger]

To the uninitiated, What is a "spider"?

A program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler.

Because most Web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. Large search engines, like Alta Vista, have many spiders working in parallel.