These spiders!

[Toby]

Right now there are 9, count 'em, 9, slurp spiders. Sounds like a line in the Christmas song -- nine slurping spiders, eight maids a milking.....

 

[Brian Austin]

Good! We want them! More spiders = better coverage on the search engines. Woohoo!

 

[Toby]

Good! We want them! More spiders = better coverage on the search engines. Woohoo!

I know they're good. I just can't get around the itch factor.

 

[maximus]

Whats a spider

 

[Brian Austin]

Whats a spider

Automated program that "crawls" the World Wide Web (www) gathering information for search engine indexes. Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, etc., all have spiders for their search engines.

 

[EHITCH]

web crawlers -- huh. well, you learn something every day. I thought spiders were folks who were, well, "spying" on the site, reading posts but not registering.
Elizabeth

 

[Brian Austin]

web crawlers -- huh. well, you learn something every day. I thought spiders were folks who were, well, "spying" on the site, reading posts but not registering.
Elizabeth

Nah, those are tagged as "guests" in our setup. In Internet speak, they're usually called "lurkers".

 

[EHITCH]

Lurkers. Hmm. Calls to mind shifty looking gents in shabby raincoats. Oh never mind, those are flashers.

 

[Brian Austin]

Lurkers. Hmm. Calls to mind shifty looking gents in shabby raincoats. Oh never mind, those are flashers.

Lurkers aren't necessarily considered a bad thing. They're primarily people who have no interest in participating in conversations (for whatever reason) but enjoy reading stuff on the site. Every discussion group has them unless it's password protected for even read-only status (PoA isn't). Even then you'll see members who have joined but not posted at all, simply so they could have some of the customization available to members (like message tracking, etc.).

I'm not commenting on what they look like.