How could Q2ABot detect stats about a Q2A installation?

Question

I am wondering how Q2ABot could detect the total number of questions in a Q2A site?

Is it avaliable as open source?

Or does it use some kind of backdoor in our Q2A sites?

Answer 1

As Gideon stated here, the bot looks for patterns in your source code.

Getting the number of questions is easy. You just go to yoursite.com/questions, look how many are on one page and how many pages there are. The same applies for tags/users.

For the version number I'm guessing it looks for any URLs that have the version number appended, e.g. code like this:

<script src="./qa-content/qa-page.js?1.6.2" type="text/javascript"></script>