Who's Online

[ydoaPs]

what is a "Yahoo! Slurp Spider"? i just saw many of them on the Who's Online page.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

It's a Yahoo! search robot. I think blike installed a mod that allows you to see them when they crawl the site.

[ydoaPs]

ahhh........so, whatever they look at shows up on the Yahoo! search engine?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Eventually it will.

[Pangloss]

Yah, I've had SFN threads come up in Google searches before. I dimly recall that that may be the way I first heard about SFN.

[YT2095]

ahhh........so, whatever they look at shows up on the Yahoo! search engine?

 

better said "whatever they CAN look at...shows..."

 

most of the time the crawler bots are disallowed from certain areas, and end up with bruised noses

[5614]

I just went to the Who's Online page and they're everywhere!

 

Look:

 

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

It's because they don't handle session cookies properly so vBulletin thinks there's a bunch, when it's actually one or two.

[5614]

1 or 2 looking at like 8 different threads??? You know better than me, but how can 2 bots be in 8 places?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

The session information doesn't update because the system doesn't realize that the bot went on--it thinks it's still looking at the page. If the bots kept the session information, vB would realize "this is the same as the guy viewing thread x, so change the who's online to make him here."

[Dave]

Indeed; that's the way it works. Spiders are designed to index as quickly as possible, and hence they just ignore any cookie information they get.