Are View numbers affected by Bots on Forums?

Question

I'm a second Admin on a forum and have noticed that the number of View of threads varies from thread to thread quite a bit. I was told that a lot of those Views are from the many Bots that come in and go thru the forums.

My question is, do they up the View number every time they come in a check a new post in a thread, or are all of those Views made by people?

Answer 1

It depends on the forum code, if the view number is incremented whatever the user agent that visits the page then yes the bots will increase this number.

Some forums may make a difference between the GoogleBot, YahooCrawler, Yandex etc. and real human operated browsers.

You can ask the developper of your forum what is done about this.