That's entirely true. I don't have hard figures (the site owner might), but I'd say we probably approach 40 or 50 percent bots, crawling all over seeking emails and whatever else they do.
There are bots crawling the AW server, but nothing
like that number.
Keep in mind that bot = a remote script. Some remote scripts are good (i.e. Google and other search engines perform an important service).
Bots that collect data to reuse or "web scrapers" are kicked as soon as I spot them. That's usually in less than an hour. They tend to be rude, greedy bots and are quickly spotted.
Bots look very different from real users because of the "user agent" attribute in the data a user sends to a server.
Bots have very different
user agents.
The member data on the bottom of the top forum page doesn't include bots (though it briefly includes would be spammer registrations, until Mac or I disallow them).
It doesn't include banned members.
In other words, currently vBulletin says we have 58,446 members. That's pretty accurate. That number only includes members who have logged in during the last 365 days. It doesn't count bots. It currently includes two Chinese would-be shoe spammers; they aren't going to be approved, and can't post if they aren't approved.
We currently have 14 Google bots indexing the site (we have Google, Bing and Yahoo bots pretty much 23/7), 6 Bing bots, and one unknown Russian indexing bot. that obeys the the standard indexing protocols, so I'm not worried about it.
We've asked rule obeying bots to obey specific rules; most bots do.