I 've setup so the guest can not read some of forums , I even setup the ban IP - but when I check who 's online , I still see certain guests from that "forbidden" country are reading the threads from the "NOT allowed" forum .
Is this because they are reading from the archive ?
How do I really prevent this ?
Thanks very much
Well if you ban someone on your forum, they can still view content cached by search engines. I don't think there's anyway to stop this, the only way I can think of is to block the spiders/crawlers so they don't index your forums but this will affect your SEO and daily traffic.
Thanks very much , Is there anyway to block the spiders/crawlers so they don't index the forums ? we do not need the SEO or heavy daily traffic - Thanks
Do you want to block bots only or all guests including bots?
If bots only then take a look at the following steps:
Step # 1
Go to ACP>Users & Groups>Groups>Add New User Group>Copy Permissions from Guest.
Name it anything you want. I would use "Bots" for example.
Step # 2
Go to ACP>Configuration>Spiders/Bots>Google>Edit Bot>User Group>Bots
Step # 3
Go to ACP>Forums & Posts>Forum Management>FORUM NAME>Permissions
Set the custom permissions for your spiders/bots by customizing the permissions for the bots group. In your case, you would untick "Can view threads" in forum settings. If you don't want them to view any thread on your forum then there's an easy way to do this. In group settings, untick "Can view threads" and save the group.