Re: Hello everybody
 

Doesn't a banned account's status/user title change to "banned?" If so, it doesn't look like the bot's account is really banned.

Re: Hello everybody
 

You know it's the offseason when a thread like this is one of the most popular ones on CD...

Re: Hello everybody
 

The mechanism that moderators use to ban accounts is different from the default provided in vBulletin. Their title does not change.

Re: Hello everybody
 

I've seen this sort of spam here before. It starts with an innocent enough post. A few weeks go by, the post falls off the most recent posts list, gets buried in the forum somewhere. Whoever/whatever created the account logs back in and puts their spam links/whatever in their signature. Changing a signature doesn't bump a post back up, so their spam ends up buried deep in a pile of posts where unsuspecting people will find it when looking through old posts for specific information. Spam like that is harder to find because not many people look through older posts, and would be less likely to report it/more likely to click the links, thinking they were safe if they've been there for that long.

Re: Hello everybody
 

But the fact that "it" posted the exact same thing on multiple threads is good evidence for a strange person, or a bot.

P.S. i wonder what happens if you PM it......

Re: Hello everybody
 

Let's find out! ;)

Re: Hello everybody
 

Do you understand that the spambot did not make that post you linked to, therefore it cannot be used as evidence one way or another?

Re: Hello everybody
 

You're right Mark. This doesn't seem obvious at first, but when you click on the author's link in that website, you get this:

Therefore, the username only posted in CD, the STEMroots website just archived it for some reason, it even provided a link to this topic.

Re: Hello everybody
 

ohhhhhh. my bad :o
obviously i did not read the website page well enough lol

Re: Hello everybody
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg7Sj...el_video_title

It was a good bot, a kind bot. All it did was say hello, and it got banned from this forum. I can't say I have many memories of it, but it certainly made us think about bots in different ways. Thanks for that.

Bye nafziger,
Jason

Re: Hello everybody
 

No.

Re: Hello everybody
 

I would believe that theory, if there wasn't a giant space before the "!" at the end (and the period in the post that Mark found). I'm sure that the kind of "bot" you described exists.

I remember a bit of spam a few years ago that was actually related to building robots. I can't remember the topic, but I do remember that it was very convincing, because I didn't do a Google search and responded to it...

Re: Hello everybody
 

Not all programmers, only the programmers who have no sense of decency.

Re: Hello everybody
 

and keep in mind that some programmers do have (at least a little) sense of decency and are not trying to destroy the world in some way

Re: Hello everybody
 

One of our programmers managed to fry 4 victors and set a (old) bot on fire twice. When they aren't dealing directly with a computer screen of code, some of them can be pretty malicious...