Noticed "Google bot", "Yahoo bot" as new users. Might be a good idea to ban bots from the forum. They create a lot of bandwidth for nothing.
Descent 1 & 2 for Windows, OS X & Linux
Only a dead troll is a good troll.

The last thing they want to do is ban search engine bots.

Without the bots visiting and indexing the site there would be no results pointing to the site for any search engine queries.

You could limit them to certain forum areas.
Descent 1 & 2 for Windows, OS X & Linux
Only a dead troll is a good troll.

The more topics randomly visited by them, the more search words indexed. More pops in search results is largely worth the bandwidth they use up.

I can tell from my own forum that a lot of such bots can eat your bandwidth like mad.

How much sense does it make to scan a forum with the gazillions of rather useless posts?

It's enough to scan the other pages containing product info and the like.
Descent 1 & 2 for Windows, OS X & Linux
Only a dead troll is a good troll.

A commercial forum has more bandwidth (and more immediate need for visibility) than a private one, even if the company is struggling financially.

It's useful in the case of a user looking for specific information, for instance "+ descent + radeon 9000" for a problem involving a video card. That way they could find a message board topic, whereas an official product page would have more general information that wouldn't turn up as much in searches.

Not necessarily, even if it is not struggling.
Descent 1 & 2 for Windows, OS X & Linux
Only a dead troll is a good troll.

Well I say the bots a good for search engines and should be allowed
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