MyBB Community Forums

This might not be no bug, but have an easy explanation

I noticed on my Who's Online list that a Guest was reading a thread that's part of the forum which only registered user should have access to.
When looking the Guest up, it seems to be googlebot (IP crawl-66-249-66-168.googlebot.com)

Do such bots have access to all forums no matter what the premissions is? Or does it use any particular group?

Bots can be set to what permission you want them to be. By default, MyBB sets bots as registered users, so that why they can crawl it. Setting it to guest in ./inc/class_session.php will stop if from being able to access those forums.

It actually defaults to Guests, not registered users. You can see that by $botgroup being 1 in class_session.php. 1 is "Unregistered / Not Logged In".

Are you running MyBB PR2 with the latest available updated code? If so, GoogleBot shouldn't actually show up as a guest, but as a search engine spider - which is what makes me think you're running older code.

I think I should have the latest code, it's not long ago that I downloaded it.

When using the Version check option, it says that both my version and the latest version is 1.00 Preview Release 2

Double check you have the 686 patch applied to your board (announcements forum) - there was a fix in this which fixed some problems with search engine spiders and permissions.

If you can't determine if you've applied it, apply it again.