GoogleBot 07:36 PM Using PM System

[sexysilver]

Someone technical or computer savvy please explain to me how a program bot thing can use the pm system lmao o.o...

Computers are taking over the world o.o...

*hides in box*

[Spaz]

Maybe GoogleBot has special permissions that allow it to view pages that normally require you to be logged in? Or maybe it says that if it just tries to go to the PM page even if it only gets the "you need to be logged in" page? I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure GoogleBot works by following links.

I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.

Edit: lol, there was an ad for Simpsons t-shirts or something at the top of the page because of the above line.

[graphitesmoothie]

Meh, it's too bad Google's caches aren't visible anymore, as it'd be a lot easier to see what GoogleBot has access to on the forums.

Actually, I was just checking Yahoo caches instead, but no way to get to PM's. :S

[Giegue]

Googlebot can access the hyperlinks to the PM system. Whether or not they have the permissions to do anything with it is where the line is drawn.

[graphitesmoothie]

That's the thing though, Rainer...if you're logged out, there's no hyperlinks that lead you to PM's. I'm assuming the same is true for crawlers, as Yahoo's cache shows no hyperlinks to PM. (Google's got removed, but I can't see why it would be different.)

[Giegue]

That's not necessarily true, since hyperlinks that would have lead you to a Personal Message system could have been posted, and judging by the evidence, there must have been (since Google relies on anchor text and hyperlinks to provide accurate results, and I certainly hope that it lacks the intelligence to do otherwise.)

Although, the only way to say that there are absolutely no hyperlinks leading to a PM system of some sort, would be to search all of the generated HTML scripts, and that would truly be a pain in the rectal area (and that's not even including the possibility that an outside website could have posted a PM link, and causing Googlebot to land in the PM URL) , thus leading me to the logical deduction that there must have been some sort of PM link that is accessible.