HELP! ...Does This Make Sense?

[Xube]

Checking the who's online area of my site, there appear to be some ROBOTS (?) scanning thru my board. What seems to be unusual to me is that they mainly appear to be scanning USER PROFILES ... and some of the messages (like "retrieving password") I find alarming?

I did a search and discovered that the IP addresses of where these guests are coming from, something called inktomisearch is a robot search engine owned by Yahoo.

I have my permissions set on my board so that "guests" cannot view others profiles... and I'm concerned about the messages that say retrieving passord... Is this normal action(s) that should be displayed from "robots"?

Anyone seen this before or know what this all means? Thanks.

• Sample List of just some of the "robots"(?) showing up on my Who's online...
  
  Guest Viewing FAQ 01:45 PM j3139.inktomisearch.com
  
  Guest Viewing Profile of a Forum Member 01:47 PM j3110.inktomisearch.com
  
  Guest Retrieving Password 01:45 PM j3138.inktomisearch.com
  
  Guest Viewing Profile of a Forum Member 01:46 PM j3148.inktomisearch.com
  
  Guest Viewing Profile of a Forum Member 01:45 PM j3175.inktomisearch.com
  
  Guest Viewing Memberlist 01:51 PM j3185.inktomisearch.com
  
  Guest Viewing Profile of a Forum Member 01:55 PM j3107.inktomisearch.com
  
  Guest Registering... 01:48 PM j3128.inktomisearch.com
  

Would a robot "register" to my board? Should they be "retrieving passwords"...? Advice please.

[Floris]

Yes this is normal.
Next time they might try to do moderator duties from drop down lists of buttons
Another time they might be going through calendar events.

They are following as much links as possible.
If they do not have the permissions, they are seeing permission denied. So no need to worry

The bot you posted is a search engine spidering your site.

[Xube]

Yes this is normal.
Next time they might try to do moderator duties from drop down lists of buttons
Another time they might be going through calendar events.

They are following as much links as possible.
If they do not have the permissions, they are seeing permission denied. So no need to worry

The bot you posted is a search engine spidering your site.

Ok, yep, they've already done the mod duties thing as well.

Just seems weird that they are spidering these areas ONLY...rather than the traditional areas that contain USEFUL info for the bots such as actual posts on my board (none of the who's online things say "reading post...." or "viewing message thread....")

[Xube]

PS: Thanks for the quick reply... this had me worried and I was considering shutting down my board temporarily.

[Floris]

If you had pressed 'search new posts' you'd see 15 other posts about this