questions about guests

[xPUDDYTATx]

i was checking out a lot of the things on these forums i never look at, and i looked at the "whose" online link at the bottom. there were 9 members and 71 guests online. when i clicked on it it showed me what each one was doing, which is a function im familiar with on my own forums, but never tried here. but one of the guests was looking at a thread started by uncle-sid25 of the +30 clan in 2009. it was a thread about the release of hawx. after looking at a few others, i found a lot of the guests looking at threads 18 months to 3 years old. are these guests simulated? are they bots or spiders or something? if they are, what exactly do they do? is there some kind of tracking that requires this site to have a certain number of hits a day that requires these "guests" to cruise old threads each day? also, it got me wondering, is that why clans have to have every member that wants to play in a tournament register here? does the site need to have a certain number of registered members for some reason? ive had a forum for a little over four years, but im very unfamiliar with a lot of the little functions so any kind of ex[lanation swould be greatly appreciated.

[DeadSpider]

Web crawlers.... spiders.... and lurkers.

 

Without spiders crawling about, the web would have a heck of a time being uptodate.