Oolite Bulletins

I've noticed recently that MSN, Yahoo and Google have a [bot] status in the who is online.
Is this going to be a problem?

No, these are indexing bots, sniffing around and errr... indexing so you can Google, Yahoo! etc stuff in their search engines.

I guess they were always here, just not visible. Crawling through the interwebs in order to index pages and make them available for their search engines is what google, bing, yahoo and the others do. They do this permanently on all websites they've ever been pointed to (or else a search in one of these search engines would return nothing). So why should this be a problem for our website?

Not testing or bug related. Moving to Outworld.

Alex wrote:

I've noticed recently that MSN, Yahoo and Google have a [bot] status in the who is online.
Is this going to be a problem?

On the contrary. I only have experience with the Google bot, but it is indexing our bb better than the internal indexing. Maybe not better, but searching at our site through Google is far easier than the internal search option. And Google bot keeps it quite up-to-date. I assume the same is valid for MSN and Yahoo.

My browser has currently a special button to a specific search on OOlite bbs with Google

Eric Walch wrote:

Alex wrote:

I've noticed recently that MSN, Yahoo and Google have a [bot] status in the who is online.
Is this going to be a problem?

On the contrary. I only have experience with the Google bot, but it is indexing our bb better than the internal indexing. Maybe not better, but searching at our site through Google is far easier than the internal search option. And Google bot keeps it quite up-to-date. I assume the same is valid for MSN and Yahoo.

My browser has currently a special button to a specific search on OOlite bbs with Google

Same here - the inbuilt Search engine has always been a joke - it's not much better with this new version of php - so I use the plug-in that one of the forum members created for Firefox

I also use this useful feature....I have a dedicated BB search bar on my browser/homepage.

Details of this and how to install it can be found here.

Edit:- I found the relevant thread in about two seconds using it!

Search engine: I've just installed it (on Firefox) and it seems to work well!