Spiders?

[Phantom]

Since a while ago, I noticed that they are some "bot" on the active user list. What are they doing here? Did someone enable some kind of ads?

 

[Mystic]

Spiders are bots that search engines use to index web pages. They search through the forums and make it possible to search through our forum's content via a normal search engine. This is why you can search for something on Google and have it return topics from our forums.

These kind of spiders aren't malicious in any way. Obviously, you can use the same technique to make spiders that are malicious, such as recording e-mail addresses to spam, but those wouldn't exactly show up on such a listing regardless.