Did you hear the latest song from GoogleBot?  It's not bad... 

bitflipper
Interesting to scan that list...select "show all" to see what the invisible people (who outnumber registered users 30:1) are reading.
 
Surprising how many are viewing very old threads. Equally surprising is how many of them are wasting their morning here in the CH.
 
Hi there, all you nameless lurkers! Don't be shy, come on in.
 
 
 
Hmm, here's a scary one: "GoogleBot is viewing a profile". Google has gone to the trouble of registering a user name for this forum so they can scan it, including areas reserved for registered members. There were three pages of bot entries, mostly GoogleBot, the rest Yahoo. 

Yes, there's a lot a bots out there including;
doomsday/bot,
misinformation/bot, 
wth/bot, 
whatsup/bot
archive/bot
whois/bot
shop/bot
price/bot
f/b/bot
fyi.bot
kypo/bot
roflol/bot
smoking/bot and many, many more (too much to list here lol)!
 
And I'm definitely not surprise to know there are way more guest than participants logged in; Often I say, my post is not just intended for the OP and re/comments by others, it's also intended for whomever happens to be visiting/passing by, which of course are the majority and that's okay; These forums hold a wealth of great information along with some very funny OT commentary and of course unfortunately along with some sorrowful rants and manic brain-{word censored}! 
.

Bapubot...

"Hmm, here's a scary one: "GoogleBot is viewing a profile". Google has gone to the trouble of registering a user name for this forum so they can scan it, including areas reserved for registered members. There were three pages of bot entries, mostly GoogleBot, the rest Yahoo."
 
ha-I googled my studio and the first few entries were entries from this forum so it`s important to remember to keep this in mind when posting(unless you`re anonymous,of course)
having said that:
I wonder what they found here,demographically speaking-
let me guess.....predominantly male,white,anglosaxon,middle-aged,religion tolerant,moderate disposable income for upgrades,plugins and premium bacon,blah,blah...............
not much to see here...................... 
where is the new generation of Sonar users? 

I tried being a bot once. Unfortunately, my natural stupidity overwhelmed my artificial intelligence. 
 
That sort of thing happens to me all the time.

webbs hill studio
"Hmm, here's a scary one: "GoogleBot is viewing a profile". Google has gone to the trouble of registering a user name for this forum so they can scan it, including areas reserved for registered members. There were three pages of bot entries, mostly GoogleBot, the rest Yahoo."

Googlebot isn't a user account (it doesn't register user accounts) it is a spider that scans your website. If you look at pretty much website report (like here we have a bot report) you will see it. Cheers...

CakeAlexS

webbs hill studio
"Hmm, here's a scary one: "GoogleBot is viewing a profile". Google has gone to the trouble of registering a user name for this forum so they can scan it, including areas reserved for registered members. There were three pages of bot entries, mostly GoogleBot, the rest Yahoo."

Googlebot isn't a user account (it doesn't register user accounts) it is a spider that scans your website. If you look at pretty much website report (like here we have a bot report) you will see it. Cheers...

Unless you disallow it in you robots.txt file.

It still visits robots.txt though :).

CakeAlexS
Googlebot isn't a user account (it doesn't register user accounts) it is a spider that scans your website. If you look at pretty much website report (like here we have a bot report) you will see it. Cheers...

You're right. Googlebot doesn't register accounts, which would be impractical for the millions of websites they scan and the gobs more that pop up every day.
 
But the fact that they can access restricted areas suggests that user profiles are accessible to anybody. Probably PM inboxes, too. Even your favorite new pub (which is secret so I won't name it)!
 
Or do spider bots have special privileges? 
 
Try logging out of the forum and looking somebody up. Do what the bots do - scan the page's source and navigate to any links you find there. I'm no HTML/javascript guru, but I don't think I could get to the profiles that way. 
 
[EDIT]Answered my own question. It turns out that yes, Googlebot in particular does have special privileges. It's essentially "su" to the internet. Which is why 1 out of 25 instances of GoogleBot are actually imposters. Lots of shady characters would like that kind of access.

Googlebot does not have special privilages. Whatever it gets the forums software has exposed.