Bot vs. Locked Forum

[legionofangels]

If I set a forum to no view for guests, will that stop the bots from crawling it?

Even if I have vb sitemap generator building a sitemap for it?

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Obviously I'm interested in the information being crawled but not viewable to guests, what is the best way to go about this without making the forum public for Guests?

[briansol]

yup.

bots are 'guests'.


There's probably 30 topics on this here.

Open your site up. Unless you have a GOOD reason to make it member only, it's best to be open from all aspects of community AND seo.

It doesn't encourage registrations.
It doesn't encourage participation.
What's the point of 0-post members who simply signed up to read it?

It encourages the user to use their back button and try the next result they got.