Hello everybody

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by squirrel

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

All of them

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?

[Molten]

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

[Joe G.]

Originally Posted by Molten

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

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

[Duke461]

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?

[Molten]

Originally Posted by Duke461

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?

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

[Duke461]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

They've become self-aware.

Darn you Skynet...

Originally Posted by Molten

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

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

[Mark McLeod]

p.s.

Originally Posted by Duke461

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

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...

By the way, has anyone reported this yet?

It's now responsible for a respectable thread.

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.

[Madison]

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

[RoboDesigners]

Originally Posted by Madison

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

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.

[Madison]

Originally Posted by RoboDesigners

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.

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

[XaulZan11]

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

[Marc P.]

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.

[Molten]

Originally Posted by Madison

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

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

[Duke461]

Originally Posted by Molten

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

No.