[3.3.x] Support Forum • Re: Excluding Bots from accessing anything on my board

Thanks for that. It's really helpful.

I did as you suggested and tested the Google bot's permissions (never occurred to me to do that to be honest). This test showed that via the UI it can't get beyond the board board index page where it says "This board has no forums" which is the same as I get if I land on that page and am not logged in.

So I guess that means the wording on Who is online is a little misleading in that, to the uninitiated (me), it seems to suggest that the user or bot is actually reading a page rather than just trying to access it. But now I know what it means I can rest a little easier.

Of course a bot is never going to attempt to connect via the UI anyway so I had a niggling doubt as to whether it can read the board pages through whatever back door it is using to find the pages in the first place. My expectation was that if a bot has no permissions on the board contents it wouldn't even be able to discover the URLs for the forums and topics. But that's clearly a false expectation on my part.

Thanks again for clarifying.

Statistics: Posted by AndySt — Mon Dec 16, 2024 8:38 pm

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