Help > Forum > General > Blocking robots

Blocking robots

When a robot views a page of your forum, our system still has to process the request the same way it would for a normal human. The same amount of memory, CPU, and bandwidth is used. Therefore, pages viewed by a robot are counted as page views.

Our system automatically blocks any malicious non-beneficial robots before they can even reach your forum, so the vast majority of robot activity would be search engines indexing your forum. That's a great thing because it will help users discover your forum in search engines.

You can prevent your entire forum or specific categories from being accessed by robots, including search engines, by using the following methods:

• Specifying ALLBOTS as a banned IP address
• Turning on password protection
• Forcing guests to log in before allowing access to the forum
• Insert the following HTML code into the Forum Head Tag HTML Code text box in the Appearance -> HTML section of your Website Toolbox account:
  
  <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
  
  Using the HTML code mentioned above can be used to block search engine robots, but should not be used to try and reliably block all robots since malicious robots can simply ignore that piece of code. To block all robots, use the other methods described above.

  
  If you still need help, please contact us.