Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Computer Reading All Posts?

Hi, Wasn't sure how to reach the moderator, but I noticed tonight that an "anonymous" was reading a new post every second or so. Clearly, too fast to be a human. If you go to who's online and then refresh immediately, you'll see the top anonymous on a new post everytime (happened to be checking to see if I'd get an answer to my post and it caught my eye...). Despite all of our efforts to be careful in our posts, a lot of personal information makes it way to this public board. Just wondering whether there is a concern.

Thank you.

It's not happening anymore, but it was about 5 minutes ago. Maybe the bulletin board was being backed up?

Is it the same anonymous or several anony-mouses?

Many of the search engines will crawl the board on a regular basis.

Since we are on the topic, the other day I noticed two search spiders and each were "reading" member profiles.
What's up with that?

It was the same anonymous - top position and every time I clicked it was on a new post/thread. And I have a fast connection. It was clearly going through all the posts at an incredibly fast rate, and was not one of the search spiders listed at the bottom. I hope it was just the Davidson software backing up the board at about midnight ET.

I see, I wonder what the search phrase was.

It was me. I just read incredibly fast.

LOL!

You two had better post your secret to speed reading success in the reading thread!

LOL!

Look, just because I am paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I guess that's why you're incognito. I doubt it's anything sinister. If I google "gifted child" Davidson Database is one of the sponsored links.

Hey there Questions. I was just noticing that there were 18 guests which seemed unusual and also checked who is online. I kept refreshing as you did and noticed the exact same thing, a new topic reading approximately every second. However, it did seem that several had been looked at for more than a few minutes seemingly a person actually reading the post. Then, the number of guests instantly dropped from 18 to 4. Perhaps this site has become very popular?

Incog, I agree with you - there is a lot of personal info about kids here and who knows what's said in the PM's and how secure they are. I think the board is being copied, and would feel better knowing it was Davidson.

Copied in what sense? I'm not sure I follow.

Who knows? There are all sorts of hacks that search for personal info - credit card #'s, etc. If you look at Anonymous and see 0 seconds, that's probably the one. It would be nice if the moderator could check out who the Anonymous is, as it seems to be a constant presence. I just noticed his name down below. I'll contact him and ask him to take a look.

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...)

Anonymous are just guest users that haven't registered. They could be real people or bots that are indexing the site to support their search engine. Just means that they aren't logged into the site.

JB

LOL!

Well, I am a person who runs spybot and adware weekly to delete cookies. Yes, they are mostly harmless, but I find them annoying, personal preference.
I did find some pretty malicous stuff on DD8's computer even though we have virus protection. Keystroke recording device, etc.
I did delete all stored PM's with personal info. There's really no reason to keep old messages up anyway, except for laziness on my part.

But I like to go to old posts from time to time - call me nosthalgic!

Me too! I just deleted what was in my PM folder.



Re-packing! Are you off again?

JBDad is correct. It's a search engine bot crawling the site, something that is done on nearly all websites. In this case it's our own internal Google Search Engine.

Great, so we don't need to be concerned with the privacy of stored P.M.'s?

Thanks!

I would use a regular email account that uses Https ( and/or PGP) if you want privacy.

No, webbots won't be able to crawl anything that requires a password to access.