If I go to the forum mainpage, I see since several days something like this:



Always some guests, that are "rating a post". Is this possible? What are they really doing here? Are these bots, and if so, are they a nuisance?

Guests are unregistered people viewing the forum or bots

That's clear, but how could they rate any posts? This should definitely be restricted to registered users.
I think it's just a misnomer, and they don't realy rate anything, but I want to know why this is shown the way it is.

add to robots.txt
Disallow: /forum/forum_rate

Just checked it, it's Yahoo Slurp checking out the forum from 5 different IP addresses.

Your robots.txt has Disallow: /forums/ which doesn't do anything since address is /forum/ without the S. Although you should let bots see the forum, just not rate, get to the post reply page, etc.

robots.txt was made before the forum change. With the old forum it was added in robots because there were so many security holes in it, and Google was used to find sites running it.

That's crazy...
Right at the moment as I was on the main forum site there were 15 lines of Yahoo! which searches the forum on different places...

Yes, Yahoo is really exaggerating at the moment. Google always did more crawling, but Yahoo is trying to catch up I think.

I just wonder why it visits all pages multiple times.