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Did I miss something?

Dr Becca, Ph.D.
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Did I miss something?
Tue, Nov 09, 2010, 6:31 pm CST

I was just checking the stats and noticed three names at the bottom of the leader board list--who are these people? Do we have new bloggers on board? It's possible they've been there forever and I just never noticed, but maybe they're new?


Brian Krueger, PhD
Columbia University Medical Center
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Sat, Nov 06, 2010, 5:11 pm CDT

You didn't miss anything.  I think they're bots.  They don't have blogs. If you stick your userID in the right place the site will direct you to a "profile" page that's empty, but the visit counter is dumb, so it adds the stats :P  I'll be sure to delete those accounts because those people are up to no good.


Dr Becca, Ph.D.
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Sat, Nov 06, 2010, 8:09 pm CDT

At the risk of revealing myself to be a total n00b, can someone explain what exactly the goal of "bots" is?


Brian Krueger, PhD
Columbia University Medical Center
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Sat, Nov 06, 2010, 8:22 pm CDT
Bots do lots of things. Some are good, some are bad :) The goal of a bot is to collect information. All of the search engines need to visit pages before they can index the pages in their search database. Bad bots test pages for easy exploits to try to take control of webpages or entire sites. And finally there are bots whose sole purpose is to flood a site with hundreds of worthless requests to prevent real people from visiting a website. This usually happens from bot networks created by viruses (or government server farms). These are usually labeled as denial of service attacks.

Tideliar
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Tue, Nov 09, 2010, 6:31 pm CST

The Overlord is an AI BotNet!

Noes!!

Did I miss something?
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