When I visit from a workstation, there’s a sidebar that shows members logged in, guests and bots. What are those bots? Additionally, are there any restrictions on accessing ET via automated means?
The bots are search engine crawlers. In regards to your question about accessing ET via "automated means", I need you to be more specific because that's a pretty general phrase.
Gotcha, had no idea there were so many - thought we were down to a handful. As to something more specific, idk. There’s the development of Ai/Agents which can be given urls but just a noob in the space so I don’t understand the boundaries yet.
Search engine bots are good in the sense that they index this site's content and make that content searchable and discoverable for others. You can view the current bots that are crawling ET at any given second by going to https://www.elitetrader.com/et/online/?type=robot
don't be a d*k my first website was in html in '95, the tech is unrecognizable to me now This particular website caught my interest in how it was built: https://moebio.com/mind/ Thought a webcrawler might be able to discern the tech stack, I really have no idea.
Any type of a bot that tries to automate the process of registering fake accounts for the purpose of submitting spam posts and links.