Free-Forums.org Support

[Janie]

Okey there is something weird going on. As soon as I send a private message to someone on my forum i see a guest logging in (yes logging in but still appearing as guest) I can also see that that person is viewing private messages (in the admin panel). It happens every time, same guest with the same IP invisibly logs in and views private messages and it is not the person I sent the message to cause I know what Ip that person has.
I have a feeling someone who is not a forum member is reading our private mail. How on earth is this possible? The IP is 66.249.65.226
Has anyone else seen this Ip on their forum?

Is this someone at Free-Forums.org doing this?

[ArmyAunt]

I've had the same thing happen on my forum. I tried banning the IP address and it just kept on with a slightly different IP. As near as I can figure out, it's just my own shadow.

[Janie]

yeah i banned the IPs too and it kept coming back with slightly changed numbers although it takes a couple of days after the ban before it shows up again.
The other admin on our forum get the same thing almost every time he logs in... same IP as I see too.
We also get a lot of weird ppl signing up with our forum and if we activate their accounts our forum gets spammed with adds and other stuff we dont want in there.
We now have a banlist of IPs and *@email.com-addys that are miles long.

[support]

These are Google/MSN/Yahoo bot IP-s for indexing.

[Janie]

Is there a way I can disable or ban this sort of indexing? If so, where do I find that function? I know it is possible to ban it on other forums but i cant find it in the Admin Panel

[ArmyAunt]

These are Google/MSN/Yahoo bot IP-s for indexing.

Ah. Makes sense now. Thanks!

[legacy2007]

yeah there is a way to turn them off, but no one will be able to find your site from google. google googlebot and you'll find an FAQ page that tells how to turn them off.

[astrodaddy]

It says you have to add a robot.txt file to the root of your server, but we dont have access to the server so how can we block them?

Found by googling googlebot........


Remove your entire website

If you wish to exclude your entire website from Google's index, you can place a file at the root of your server called robots.txt. This is the standard protocol that most web crawlers observe for excluding a web server or directory from an index. More information on robots.txt is available here: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html. Please note that Googlebot does not interpret a 401/403 response ("Unauthorized"/"Forbidden") to a robots.txt fetch as a request not to crawl any pages on the site.

To remove your site from search engines and prevent all robots from crawling it in the future, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
To remove your site from Google only and prevent just Googlebot from crawling your site in the future, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
Each port must have its own robots.txt file. In particular, if you serve content via both http and https, you'll need a separate robots.txt file for each of these protocols. For example, to allow Googlebot to index all http pages but no https pages, you'd use the robots.txt files below.

For your http protocol (http://yourserver.com/robots.txt):

User-agent: *
Allow: /
For the https protocol (https://yourserver.com/robots.txt):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Note: If you believe your request is urgent and cannot wait until the next time Google crawls your site, use our automatic URL removal system. In order for this automated process to work, the webmaster must first create and place a robots.txt file on the site in question.

Google will continue to exclude your site or directories from successive crawls if the robots.txt file exists in the web server root. If you do not have access to the root level of your server, you may place a robots.txt file at the same level as the files you want to remove. Doing this and submitting via the automatic URL removal system will cause a temporary, 180 day removal of your site from the Google index, regardless of whether you remove the robots.txt file after processing your request. (Keeping the robots.txt file at the same level would require you to return to the URL removal system every 180 days to reissue the removal.)