I've noticed several bots floating around, but I have also found myself greeting a few new people to the boards each morning, much more than what it was like a month ago! I think our name got let loose somewhere new and a lot more found out about us!
Now that record has been broken:
But I'd go with the bot suggestion or maybe NateO and them are testing something? Thats an awful lot of guests.
Its basically a zombie computer that is usually just used to distribute spam or hack websites from what I know. You hear of spam rings that have rooms of hundreds or thousands of computers, that all they do is hit forums and other sites to screen scrape e-mail addresses typically to use for spam.
You're talking about a Worm, which is more of a malicious deal. Ordinarily, Bots are harmless, or actually useful, if you want your pages to be indexed and searchable by major search engines, see the following:
