WWGFA

Just noticed that google and bing bots are logged in a private forum (who knows how many others). May it be of some concern to anybody? Like they might be crawling and indexing private topics, while monitoring traffic and thus users?

Do you mean "private forum" as in: this site? That's normal, they have access to the general areas of the forum (the same parts you're seeing), which are not meant to be private. The Premium Area is the only part that's off-limits to the bots.

You can always see which bots are active (Google and Bing in this case (and usually it's just those two)).

Thank you for the answer. I still don't understand what's the benefit of microsoft and google tracking users and monitoring activity inside a highly sensible, regarding ones privacy, forum. In my opinion exceptions should be made inside robot.txt especially for these bots. In light of this matter i would like to ask you: what is the website's privacy policy about any entities outside the wwgfa domain willing to collect user or traffic data?

You can read our privacy policy here. The bots are here for search indexing, because weer do want to be found.

You are yourself responsible for keeping your activity in this forum private. For example by not registering with your regular email address. If you want to post anything that you think might make you identifiable or that you don't want linked to your IP address, wait until you can post in Premium. Or use a VPN.