After years of leaving the threads open for the public to read, with registration required only to post, I have recently changed all my forums to the setting where one would have to register and log in even to read. Yet in the Who's Online section, numerous anonymous readers are often shown "reading a thread in flat mode" and "printing a thread" and "viewing a user's profile" -- although I also changed the user list to "show to no one."

At first I figured they were search engine robots trying to search the threads as they used to, but when I trace the IPs, they don't very often come back to known search engine companies.

What's this about? Are there actual unregistered people reading and printing threads and profiles? And if so, how so?

http://consciousevolution.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?Cat=

UBB.threads™ 6.0.3

Thanks,
Maria

could be old links found in the search engines people are hitting - most likely they are just getting screens that tell them to login to perform that function.

Cool. Thanks for the reply.

BTW, I just updated my forums to 6.5.2, and the upgrade went very smoothly. The one bug that appeared, I easily found the fix for on these forums.

Many thanks to you folks for all of that. I like the upgrade!

Maria

You're welcome, glad it worked as easily as it has for me

There's a nifty little add-on over at Threadsdev.net that will show you where the anonymous users are coming from.

You can check it out here.