Guests or bots ?

is there a way of figuring out whether the number of guests under 'Active Users' represents real people or bots scouring the forum content ?

i'm saying this because in another forum where the number of visitors usually ranges between 5 and 10, we get the occasional blip and i've always wondered why that should be

a bot should be trackable by the amount of information consumed withine a given time frame, anything over say 10 pages per minute should be enough for identification. The trick would be to assign a temporary user id (or maybe there's one already in the forums software), and if consumption is higher than a certain threshold, then temp ban the ip, or for the more adventurous use a redirect to some large randomly generated content Having said that the feckers would probably use the generated content for anti-spam filtering :\

whether this would be feasible as an additional overhead on a large forum, in terms of return on investment is a whole kettle of fish

From what I remember vbulletin has a built in identification of certain bots (most of the major search engines) and normally doesn't display them in the guess list. Most valid bots identify themselves.

This is correct.

j