List of users currently online and Facebook

[Meruline]

I noticed that "Facebook" is listed in the "users currently online" at the bottom of the Nexus forum page. I'm not sure what this means. Can someone explain? How is Facebook using / connecting with the Nexus forums?

[Guest deleted34304850]

maybe zukerberg is a mad skyrim modder when he's not destroying democracy?

[Pickysaurus]

I would imagine this is a Facebook web crawler, much like the ones from Google, Yahoo, etc. It's basically a bot that pokes around on the web indexing pages.

[anjenthedog]

Yeah, they scrape Nexus and other sites to populate their search engine responses. It does a few things beneficially, even when it feels a bit sus to the casual user who see facebook/google/etc entry under signed-in users.

1. it reduces the number of hits they need to make on the site (significantly). Imagine if every <insert game name> search resulted in an on-demand scan of Nexus. We'd be going nuts because the site was unreachable.
2. it fills a database (at the search engine) full of links and blurbs from the content to site topics
3. Due to #2, it speeds up a given person's query (significantly)

As to any mental discomfort from seeing them there? ... well I get it. tbh, I feel the same on a visceral level, but I do know why they do it. Or at least what it brings to the "game" for sites like Nexus (or social networking sites in general) and for people performing associated queries. (I'm not going to entertain the "business" side of things on this topic of "why?", as it's not terribly germane and way too open to speculation of nepharious acts)