Eclipse Community

So I spotted this entry, under online registered users there´s a "Google [Bot]". But who or what is this? Also, it cant be clicked as other users can. And it is not listed under the members. Does anybody know? Normally it is not there...

I would imagine it's the forum software sniffing the Googlebot crawler UA from the recent connections list and calling it a "Registered User"

Pretty much. Crawler/spider bots that are recognised by a valid user-agent identifier have their own 'hidden' account for whatever reason, it's not done with a catch-all checker like most forum software does it.

Presumably to allow certain bots into certain forums and not others, which is actually relatively smart but also means internally the second person to register becomes ID 60-something, lol.

Don't worry about it unless it starts requesting invalid URIs.

robots.txt anyone?

Not every bad bot likes to abide by robots.txt. The worst offenders are those that hit the forum, check robots.txt, and then never check it for updates ever again, assuming it's perfectly okay to hit it. (Ahrefs, Semrush, and MJ12 are three rather good examples of bots that pull this garbage, I tend to throw them straight into disallow list immediately when setting up a website so they can't infect it with tons of requests, these three bots send so many... Yandex and Baidu are quite bad too, the former being worse than the latter, but both of those can at least be told to GTFO eventually.)

I genuinely doubt a human spammer being paid a penny a day to spam forums for SEO backlinks from some Indonesian dump, let alone a bot from Ukrainian hosting that doesn't have any administration team, would be smart enough to decipher the anti-spam mechanism we have in place here. This place, unlike a lot of other forums being maintained by asinine admins, knows for a fact a reCAPTCHA challenge is not the be-all-and-end-all for stopping spammers.

It's also been somewhat proven from my own in-house testing that reCAPTCHA favours Windows 10/Android/Apple systems using Chrome or Safari, everything else is treated more strictly in the challenge filter, and when it does give you 'suspicious requests, try again later' it only tells you after you click the audio challenge button (or you realise your internet connection is not messing up, but Google is throttling your connection speed to their servers). Basically managed to circumvent a reCAPTCHA block by using Chrome, on the exact same computer, same IP, everything. Firefox and every other browser was blocked. I also once pulled off the same trick on a mobile device running Android 7, it unblocked me after I filled it out in Chrome, but refused to load in Firefox Mobile.

On that note, the audio challenge is a million times easier and makes an ounce of sense compared to the image version, particularly when reCAPTCHA asks for the likes of a 'crosswalk' which it seems to be particularly finicky about what is classed as a crosswalk and what isn't. Probably something related to US-based systems, but it's genuinely aggravating nonetheless regardless of where you are considering the previously highlighted problem with it.

Robots.txt is an archaic solution to a problem it doesnt even solve anymore.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Robots.txt

Some google spyware

No. It's a crawler. Indexing publicly availible web sites and pages is by absolutely no means meeting any serious definition of spyware.

I just encountered the same thing just with a "registered user" named "Bing [BOT]"