Annoying bots hogging forums / websites

[Eidolon]

Anyone else had problems with 64.208.172.176, Alexa's bot? Earlier in the week it was caught with being '40 guests' on our forum, and this evening I found it was being counted as '85 guests' on the forums. I've resorted to banning this bot as it seems to be far less controlled than when Google crawls the forums recording only a handful of 'guests'.

By possibly coincidence I noticed prior to the ban the server load was around 6, yet shortly after the banning it had dropped to 1.6, and it's now below 0.5. I wonder if this bot was causing a high server load due to it's bad crawling.

[eUKhost.com]

seems like their bot was trying to make an image of your website hosting as archive.org is owned by them and they keep full copy of all website hostings in archive.org

Maybe this bot is the reason for max users recorded on our forum as well as most of the times records were broken from 1 AM - 3 AM. We don't have any such content on our forum for anyone to come online so late

[Eidolon]

I did find one bug of sorts which didn't help. The 'quote post' button was visible to all users, even if they couldn't reply to that forum. Thus for each post the crawler was following the quote link to the posts page which gave an error. Google is much more sensible usually in not creating so many users.

[john692]

I believe the Yahoo Slurp bot does this aswell in which it makes the guests go up dramatically. The good thing is it makes your forum look active, the bad thing is that it knocks up your servers CPU useage.