What exactly are the [Bot]'s doing?

[Peg Leg]

What sort of info do these things gather?

[limecat]

generally they're related to search engines, which are checking for new pages / posts to add to their index.

[TheBear]

What sort of info do these things gather?

They archive the site for search engines, generally. They also take a snap shot of each webpage, so that pages which are no longer available online can be viewed as cached pages.

On a forum that I was previously a moderator on, you could sometimes find cached pages which showed a post which was half-written and not yet posted, as it happened to have been snapped by a bot.

[meinster]

What sort of info do these things gather?

Everything you can see (when not logged in). Posts, posters, search queries, etc.

you could sometimes find cached pages which showed a post which was half-written and not yet posted, as it happened to have been snapped by a bot.

If true, that was down to a seriously mis-configured forum.

[TheBear]

What sort of info do these things gather?

Everything you can see (when not logged in). Posts, posters, search queries, etc.

you could sometimes find cached pages which showed a post which was half-written and not yet posted, as it happened to have been snapped by a bot.

If true, that was down to a seriously mis-configured forum.

Or I could see it because of my permissions, maybe?