What exactly are those "Spiders" that you can ocassionaly see in the Whos Online list?

What exactly are those "Spiders" that you can ocassionaly see in the Whos Online list?

Spiders are special software "bots" that traverses a site logging & in some cases, copying the page content. VNN is spidered frequently, but other than the google spider, I don't know whom is taking such an interest in VNN posts and posters. The days of internet anonymity are over (especially if you have a static IP address!)

These bots can gather everything from the IP address to email address and may be triggered to search for certain words, such as "fbi" (much like some phone line tapping is triggered by certain words.)

The spiders traversing VNN may be wholly innocent, but I think given the nature of the forum, that at least a few of the spiders are engaged by monitoring organisations.

The CURRENT SOFTWARE this forum runs on could be made to allow only registered human members with real email addys being the only ones allowed to VIEW & create posts.