What are the bots browsing these forums?

[wangta]

Sorry for my ignorance but I can see now that baidu spider, bing bot and google bot are also looking at f gaijin. What are they and why are they here?

Can they hitch a ride on user's net connections? I only ask this because when I lived in Korea and used a wireless net connection, I later found my Oz address banned by a website supposedly because it was blacklisted there. I had never posted on that website, just looked at some interesting threads and I never go to weird or underground or illegal websites, nor do I spam.

I wonder if that was linked to some bot riding off my computer's web connections. Anybody know?

[wagyl]

In the absence of anyone else reacting to your paranoia, they are search engine spiders, otherwise known as web crawlers. They are indexing so that certain FG threads are searchable. And they do not have access to the whole of the site, either.

I can't speak with any certainty about your Korean experience but I will say that blacklisting can often be very broad brush. Often a whole ISP is blacklisted to stop posting by a problem member on a dynamic address. In fact, I understand that a certain site has ended up banning whole nations to avoid spam from Canadian Journalists. Well, not every Canadian Journalist.

[Coligny]

I was ip banned from a bewbs and gun forum in Pennsilvania last week... Never registered there, never posted, was just browsing them bewbs... (No nippy, no bush, God would not allow this, only murder, blood and destruction allowed, like the old testament wanted it...)

This planet sux...