Saw that there were several guests here with "Yahoo slurp spider" as their "names".
What does this mean?

Search engine "Bots", electronics snoops;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

Crap that uses bandwidth for no reason.. (In my opinion)

Search engine "Bots", electronics snoops;)

Ah, lovely.
What is the purpose?
Merely because they can?

PS. As of this writing--10 o'clock Eastern time, there are a full dozen of them here, going through the Archives, reading my deathless prose no doubt.

I cannot recall these things ever being here before, and in these numbers. Odd.

Ah, lovely.
What is the purpose?
Merely because they can?
Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link it sees. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed (for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags). Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine

Slurp on this, you Godless Yahoo spider-smelling bastards!!

http://www.kiowapilots.com/forums/images/smilies/50cal.gif

http://homerderby.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/jim-thome-crotch-grab.jpg

Hehehe (Check google in a couple days,your reply will be archived :D)

PS. As of this writing--10 o'clock Eastern time, there are a full dozen of them here, going through the Archives, reading my deathless prose no doubt.

I cannot recall these things ever being here before, and in these numbers. Odd.
They've always been here; they were just showing up as "Guest" until I noticed that vBulletin can identify and report them, and enabled that setting.