Good Stats, shame about the robot attacks isn't there a decent security around to deal with that or is it too expensive.
Because this is a public web site, it can be accessed by any other computer on the internet.
There are benign robots and malign robots. The benign ones are the web search indexers that crawl your site so that it can appear on a search - Bing, Google, etc. We want these.
The malign ones are used by spammers, hackers, and other destructive types. They crawl the web looking for sites with known vulnerabilities and then they exploit them to spread spam and viruses, or merely to destroy your site.
Both types of robots will appear as 'guests' in the stats and there is nothing we can do to stop that other than make the site members only, so that 'guests' cannot access it. We don't want to do that.
Occasionally I block whole ranges of IP addresses. The other day I did Ukraine, Pakistan, and most of China, on the basis that I would guess 100% of the requests originating from those locations are not individuals interested in who won the recent elections or what Frank Walker said to Stuart Syvret in 2008.
When I took over the admin of this site, were getting hundreds of spurious accounts being registered by robots. One day we had an attack and they registered, literally, several thousand accounts within the space of about 30 minutes. Anyway, I wrote my own modifications to the forum source code and since then we have had zero false registrations. So we seem, for the time being to have got rid of the false registrations but we have to put up with the 'rogue guests' - sort of like my house at the weekend really.
