Curious about forum use - This is NOT a poll; Need a Techie

[billie_morini]

Tonight I looked to see who is on-line and using the forum. Can one of you tech saavy website designer guys tell me more about what I see, please? I see this:

Registered users: billie_morini, Bing [Bot], Google [Bot], Google Adsense [Bot], Yahoo [Bot]
Legend: Administrators, Global moderators

Specific questions
1. Are the [Bot] users real people?
2. If not, then what exactly is Bot doing?
3. What is the difference between an administrator and a moderator?
4. Is an admonistrator always on-line?
5. If so, is he really looking at something specific, or does he run monitoring software that alerts him to check on something?

Thank you.
billie

[drowningbitbybit]

The 'bots' are not real people... they're from the search engines and they scan the site for content etc.

[jaffa1949]

Ha Billie, a moderator if they are moderate, gets to phase out spam, trolling and nasty stuff.We can edit and embed stuff too, moderation is good because it is not necessarily an owner of the site but members of the forum community that look after moderation.
Administration is the owners and a group of senior people who have a good grasp on the foundations of what is acceptable (legally and in courtesy and to the business underlying the forum) There are wider discretionary resources for the administrators with the ability to alter moderators decisions.
important subjects get talked about by all concerned

[billie_morini]

Thank you, Drowning and Jaffa.

[surf patrol]

An excellent summary