Spiders? Internet ones, not crepy crawling ones...

[Lorah]

Has anyone else noticed how many "Yahoo! Slurp Spiders" have been on here lately? I know they help with collection of data for the search engines, but they are only really allowed to have 4 on any one site at a time...we have been getting 6+ of them lately.

"Google Spiders" are being much better about it...I've only seen 2 of them on at a time.

I'm wondering if they are what might be slowing down the site sometimes???

[becky]

well most times when i have seen the spiders they are on different pages so I think its good for SCM to be found on the net and potentially get more members which is always a good thing.

[LMS]

spiders don't slow down the site anymore than members do, and you have to have hundreds of members online at a time for it to affect the speed of the site.

I've never heard of yahoo limiting how many spiders can be on a site at once, but remember that just like if you log off SCM but stay on the page, it still shows you as online for 10-15 min after you log off, it's the same way with the spiders. Just b/c it shows them here doesn't mean they still are.
If you go into the "Who's online" page and see what their last activity is, some may be as long as 15 minutes ago. Those are normally inactive spiders that aren't really "on" the site anymore, our list just hasn't updated them off of it yet.

[Lorah]

oh ya... I forgot about the lag time for showing who's online....and cool about it not doing any more slowing than members do...I guess I was under the impression they caused more slowing.....

sounds like its not an issue then. :)