Adwiteeya Agrawal Security fanatic. Reverse Engineer and Web App Specialist.

Ohkay, so I am not assuming that people know what a bot is. A bot is basic a program that crawls your website, that is, it tries to visit every possible page and every single link on the website. Then it stores images of those pages on its server. So basically when you type in a keyword on google.com, what comes up as results are the pages the google bot crawled and if you wish to see the pages in the format google saved them, then you gotta click on the cache option that appears when you hover over the links.

The CMS that i use for my forum is phpBB and it has worked pretty well so far. Now, phpBB has organised all users/visitors of the forums in various user groups by default, and one of the default user groups is “bots”. Currently there are 51 bots registered. Now generally forums have a feature that you can see which users are online. And just a day back when I was signed in I saw the name google[bot] as the online user. The first thing i thought was that a user has registered an account with the username google [bot]. I quickly opened up the members list but was surprised that there was no such user. And then the obvious struck me.!!!
It was THE BOT.

So as habit of taking screenshots of the unusual things i see on the internet, I did not miss out on this one.
Here check it out, the purple color name that appears next to my name in the online users section. That’s pretty much entirely how you feel its presence :D.
(you might have to click on it to view it clearly)

Now when I told the same to one of my friends… It was hilarious to learn what they interpreted by my statement “Doooode!, google [bot] visited my forum” What my friend had in my mind was that the cartoon that looked like the logo of android was there on my screen and it was jumping all over the website :D.

Well I know it is a small thing….but somehow this being the first encounter has made this memorable. :)