"1 Viewing" Hidden Moderator Forum?

[SOnline2]

We have a moderator-only forum which is invisible to registered users, and whenever a registered member is searching the forums, that moderator forum invariably has a "1 viewing" marker next to it. If there's 3 people searching the forum it'll say "3 viewing." When there's no one searching the forum, the marker goes away.

This problem was seen with the 3.6.8 and is still there with our current 3.7.3.

I've tried unindexing that forum from searches, and the marker still appears. When I use a test account in usergroup 2, I do not see the forum nor can a search bring up any unique content to that hidden forum. There is one public forum in the same administrator grouping of forums which users can access, for questions and complaints about the board.

Is this a bug? Or is there something I'm missing and need to look at?

[Jake Bunce]

Some one has requested a page inside of the moderator forum. We don't know anything beyond that. Note that if some one tries to view a page they don't have access to then they will only see a "no permission" message but they still count as a viewer.

There are many legitimate explanations for this. It may be some kind of bot or spider that got the link somehow. For example, if you have Adsense banners on your forum then I think Google sends spiders to visit referring pages.

Just double check your permissions and confirm that users cannot access that forum by trying to load the URL directly.