i saw this
Registered users: Loki Von Basilisk, MSN [Bot], Yahoo [Bot]
just woundering whats up

in many forums bots are registered special members. phpBB, the forums software, manages it that way, although I'd also like if they were completely hidden but well..

Well, I'm certain that bots are relatively harmless, and they've been around for ages, so I think it is safe to ignore them, and continue doing what we do....

Bots (Shortened from robots) in this case are the "fingers" of search engines, so generally they're harmless. They're more commonly known as spiders or crawlers, so I think calling them bots is just a peculiarity of phpbb.

The bots/crawlers/spiders spread across the internet looking for new or updated pages. When they find one, they report back to the host search engine, allowing them to catalogue the updates, so search engine users can find the pages in their search results.

Bots in a broader sense of the word refer to automated programs that undertake repetitive tasks for users. These types of bots can include malware, such as spam email generators.

I've checked the admin control panel and there doesn't seem to be a way to hide the bots. There's an option to deactivate bots, which I assume means to prevent them indexing the site. But this means the forums would basically be invisible to the internet, and a lot of potential forum viewers would miss us. There would also likely be a big server lag if we were to reactivate them at a future date, whilst all the bots attempt to crawl over the forums to see what has changed since their last visit. For that reason, they're a necessary evil and will have to just stay there.