Well, UBB threads is a very popular system used by a lot of people. They're probably more secure than most systems. Just click on the link in the footer if you're interested in them.
If you ever want to see if something has been publicly copied (meaning that it's duplicated and available publicly elsewhere) use
http://www.copyscape.com/ They're pretty good and they've picked up on a site of mine that has been duplicated in South America. Unfortunate, but not much that I can do about it. It's not as useful for a UBB based forum though because it'll pick up the fact that it's the same software running and not necessarily pick up duplicated content so it doesn't help in this case.
However, there are literally thousands of indexers out there. The common ones (google, yahoo, ask, etc.) all have known "browser agents" which is just a way to identify what type of software is reading a web page. I'm sure UBB pick the top ones because it's "cool" to see that yahoo or google is crawling your site. But they probably don't have the University of Central Wayne County's crawler in their list of known agents. So that browse will appear to be "anonymous" just like someone who's using Firefox 3 and not a registered user.
There are also programs out there that allow you to copy all content of a public available website. Some people just do that so that they can read content offline. Some site archive the complete history of all sites. The wayback machine on
http://www.archive.org is a trip.
But anytime that anyone is doing something like that, you'll likely see many simultaneous "reads" of web pages. It's just how those programs work. 99.99% of the time it's not nefarious. Just other programs out there doing what they're supposed to do.
So long as you use a secure password and don't give out that information, you probably have nothing to worry about. What has always scared me is that our ATM bank codes are only 4 digits. Seriously, like that is really easy to break!
JB
(Not associated with ANY companies that do software for this site. I did sleep at a holiday inn last night...)
