Preventing unidentified bots from accessing your forum

Unidentified bots are automated programs or scripts that try to access your forum but don’t declare who they are or don’t match any known, trusted bots.

• Identified bots — e.g. Googlebot, Bingbot. They usually follow rules and identify themselves properly.
• Unidentified bots — scrapers, spammers, or other automated tools that hide their identity or fake their credentials to collect data, create fake accounts, or abuse the forum.

We automatically detect and block unidentified bots. However, some bots may still get through or some may access several pages before they are detected and blocked. If the Analytics section of your account shows a large number of guest page views, you can consider making one or more of the following changes to prevent unidentified bots from accessing your forum:

• You can make your forum private or make your forum invite-only. However, this would also block identified bots like Google and Bing from indexing your forum content.
• If all of your users are from a single or a few specific countries, only allow those specific countries to access your forum.
• In your account Analytics, check the countries that guest users are from and block countries that don't seem to represent legitimate users. For example, unidentified bots from Russia, China, and Brazil are common.

If you still need help, please contact us.