What kind of permissions am I supposed to set for Robots?

What kind of permissions am I supposed to set for Robots?

Guests?
Members?
Mods?
Admin?

I notice that when they come, they dont stay very long.

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Are you talking about the robots.txt or something else?

In IPB, in the admin panel, it shows a listing for spiders, and it has a list that says

"Treat spider/bot as part of which group?
This is useful as you can specify group settings for a 'bot' group which can restrict access to certain areas, etc."

Should I set it as a guest or as a member?

Also, it has

"Spider Bot User-Agent
Use this section to list which search engine user-agents you'd like to be treated as a search engine visit along with a 'human' name for the online list in a bot=Human Name format.(one per line)
Example: googlebot=Google.com"

Is there like a list of those someplace? I would like to recognize all (or at least more than 5) of the search engine spiders that come to my site.

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You MUST treat them as visitors or create a seperate group for them (like I did)

If you treat them as members then spammers will be able to post in your forum without registering(just by changing their headers)

A list of bots can be found here : http://www.botspot.com/search/s-search.htm

1 other quick question.

If a robot is crawling my page and finds a link in a thread that takes it to another site, does it crawl away? or does it pass over and continue along on my page with its mission until it gets bored. I have a news section that is packed with RSS feeds, and I would hate for it to push spiders out of my forum.

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No it will not go away.

It will crawl all the pages of your site that it must, and then it will continue with other sites.

See how informative you are?

Man. Thanks a lot I would bother other people, but they are all asleep -_-

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It's ok.

That's the purpose of this forum anyway

I would set them as a guest.  When logged in as a member they might get session ids or see different urls than that of a guest would.

[Guest]

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Yahoo crawler, Googlebot, Msnbot, Baidu Spider