SEO question
 

Our forum uses javascript to tab some of the categories and so far so good.
You can see it here: http://www.dailysportspages.com/forums
The question I have is whether it is legal (by spider standards) to have a script that detects whether the visitor is human or a spider...and if spider then force them to use a different template that doesn't have the tabs.

I've heard somewhere that this could get you banned from some search engines but I'm not 100% sure. Anyone know?

If your asking if it's good to cloak, the answer is no
if your asking if the bots can see all the forums that the tab's point too, view the source of the page and see if you can see those forums.

The source right now shows all the forums but in the future we'll be using AJAX and the source won't include all the forums, so in that case it's not good to have the bots use a non-tab style?

point blank if you are showing different content to guest, as the the spiders, you'll be banned shortly

it's the same content, just different skin