Members online now

[Rob Stevens]

Hmm, just noticed this;
Members online now; Total: 106 (members: 1, guests: 92, robots: 13)

Robots!? What does that mean?
Is there some AI outfit constantly scanning our website?

 

[Michael Grace]

Anyone, member or not, is labeled a guest if not logged in. Robots or "bots" are extremely common components of web traffic generally. They can be malicious but many of them do routine data gathering tasks, for example indexing material so that search engines are effective at finding information that we search for.

 

[Benson Gray]

Internet robots are not unusual and commonly search engine related as Michael indicated. The first image below shows that 153 different robots have visited the wcha.org site since the beginning of the year listed in the order of those that have shown up most frequently. The second one shows the most common of the 106 different search engines which have delivered connections to this site. I was surprised to discover that we had 26 hits from Google in New Zealand this year. The third one shows the most common of the 3901 pages from non-search engine web sites which have made connections to this site. It is disturbing to see that many of these domains end with .ru indicating that they are in Russia. This is all probably much more than you wanted to see. Let me know if you have other questions or want more details. Thanks,

Benson