Hello everybody
 

Hello there people. I'm extremely cheerful being part of this great forum.

All the best !

Re: Hello everybody
 

Are you a real person?

Re: Hello everybody
 

Are you?

Re: Hello everybody
 

No, but I am an exceptionally good AI, does that count?

Re: Hello everybody
 

Oh, is that what Canadians are called these days ;)

Re: Hello everybody
 

maybe, maybe not.

Re: Hello everybody
 

I have to say, the nonexistent association with any team, the ambiguity of the post and the grammar only a foreigner from a non-english speaking country could speak all lead me to believe that this gentleman may not have anything to do with FIRST.
That being said, if you are real, Welcome!

Re: Hello everybody
 

And if you're not, the STILL WELCOME!

Re: Hello everybody
 

Pretty sure he (it?) is real. I don't think bots can be cheerful.

Re: Hello everybody
 

I don't know......

I just had this four-line conversation with it:
Me:Are you cheerful?
Cleverbot: No.. Are you?
Me:Can you be cheerful?
Cleverbot: Yes.

Re: Hello everybody
 

S/he cared to fill out the location of residence as a real place...

Re: Hello everybody
 

And a Google search of the text reveals that it's not a spambot (the only other hit for the text is on a site that just references the post made here on CD).


Edit to avoid double-posting:
RE: Mark's find...my mind is exploding. Are bots really getting that smart, rotating phrases (and punctuation marks!) between posts to evade death by simple Google-search?

Re: Hello everybody
 

Found this match from another forum (chef.com in Taiwan) posted today. Odd post in an all Chinese language forum...

Re: Hello everybody
 

This thread is quickly turning into how programmers are tearing our world apart, destroying internet havens close to us.

(something to remember during build season for the typical hardware/software skirmish that develops)

Re: Hello everybody
 

What? Maybe I'm just tired but I don't know where you got that.

Re: Hello everybody
 

I got it from here.

It was loosely based, and I'm usually too lazy to direct quote.

Re: Hello everybody
 

How many Alan Turings does it take to spot a spambot?

Re: Hello everybody
 

Too many... :)

I think it would be interesting to see how this spambot continues its posts... Will it always be benign, just filling server space, or will it turn evil and start advertising?

Re: Hello everybody
 

why would anyone make a bot on this site it seems pointless

Re: Hello everybody
 

Sadly this bot uses better punctuation and capitalization than many on this site.

Re: Hello everybody
 

All of them :p

It may be a human masquerading as a bot. Perhaps the purpose is to find easily-posted-to fora, as targets for some future spam?

Re: Hello everybody
 

I've actually found it interesting to read the spam posted on this site as it evolves. There have been multiple times a bot has made me think about the thread in a way I hadn't before. Once I saw a bot make a reference to recording music in a thread about winning a record. It was completely unrelated, but it actually made sense in an analogy sort of way. Perhaps in the future we should read posts made by bots and think about what they say before immediately reporting it. Yes, we should report it too. But in the meantime it can make us think.

Jason

Re: Hello everybody
 

My favorite one was a spambot that copied an intelligently worded, deeply technical question posted years ago. Despite the links in its signature, I was quite impressed with the spambot's knowledge of the IFI control system. It was even in the right forum!

Some related spambot humor

Re: Hello everybody
 

Its definitely a bot. found the exact same wording and username:
http://greenstems.org/2011/07/hello-everybody/

By the way, has anyone reported this yet?

Re: Hello everybody
 

They've become self-aware.

Darn you Skynet...

Re: Hello everybody
 

At this point, is it spam or a conversation starter? Is it possible to be both? If it is both, is it really proper to delete the spam? Just alot of questions involved with this sort of situation. I'll be interested to see how this situation is dealt with.

Jason

Re: Hello everybody
 

And now they're questioning their own messages! :O

Re: Hello everybody
 

p.s.
Circular logic. Your link is actually this OP post, not a different spambot post. Kara earlier dismissed the post you found. Look at it more closely...

It's now responsible for a respectable thread.

Re: Hello everybody
 

To the people who are saying report this, it's technically not doing anything bad. It posted one harmless, and somewhat nice post, and since then we've been talking for 2 whole pages over one comment. Unless it posts again (which I want it too), and that post is obviously spam, then we should let it be.

Re: Hello everybody
 

The site has measures in place to question/verify whether an account is spam or real. By ignoring this message, it undermines some of those measures and could lead to a flood of spam later.

The account has been banned. Y'all might enjoy spending your free time deleting spam, but I have other hobbies :p

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...

Re: Hello everybody
 

So nice to see people saying such nice things about me. :)