Search Engine Trap
 

I noticed on my site (currently active users) that Google Bot and others always tries to follow the reply and search links. It would be great if someone could write a HACK that would catch listed search engines by user agent to redirect to the archive pages when they are doing stuff like this.

Easier than that... create a file called "robots.txt" and place it in the root directory of your site. The file should contain the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/newreply.php
Disallow: /forum/newthread.php
Disallow: /forum/search.php

etc etc.. just list out any files that you do not want search engines to read. Most good engines will obey this file.