what is a spam bot?

i was asked that and have no clue what it is..i said yes at first then my profile wouldnt work so i put no and it allowed me to enter...so i am assuming it isnt a gpood thing?

In very simple terms which is what I understand, a spambot is a program that finds sites and spams them randomly with little or no human interaction required.

By having that checkbox the spambots will not know what to click and will require no human interaction from our administrators to keep it out and so helping to reduce the amount of spam posted here

Edit, Jillian's answer is much more thorough

I'm glad you got sorted.

Spam bots are programs that register and post links, spamming the forum.

From here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_bot

Forum spambots surf the web, looking for guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums and any other web forms to submit spam links to the web forms it finds. These spambots often use OCR technology to bypass CAPTCHAs present. Some spam messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of target marketing or even phishing, making it hard to tell real posts from the bot generated ones. Not all of the spam posts are meant for the readers; some spam messages are simply hyperlinks intended to boost search engine ranking.

Edit: Posting while you did, Ralph.