What in Blazes is a Bot?

I'm not the one to help you on this (we know each other, and I'd say if I could, but I'm not the smartest advisor.) Lots of others here know more.

"Bot" is short for "RoBot". In this case it refers to a program (or programs) written for the purpose of creating userid's that represent the Bot (artificial people).

The motive behind the creation of some of these Bots is not entirely clear. Some UserId's are used to sell products, so their motivation is simple. The motive behind other Bot UsersID's is less obvious.

A lot of the apparently artificial Userid's (people) being created don't initially appear to sell anything at all, but they could be a precursor to a return visit with a sales pitch. Or they could simply be experiments in seeing how to create userid's automatically, for some future purpose.

Thanks!

Gone seem to be the days when actual people checked in and started a thread.
Hard for me to remember my first thread at abuzz, but one of the first was asking about corgies and no corgie people answered, at least in any immediate way, so I was crushed. That was when he first plopped into my place.
Also whatever I said on one of those first threads caused some rude man to say something negative to me. That was Roger. (He was probably right).
I'm glad I hung around.

This bot stuff is sort of wild.

They're at a quite primitive stage at this point. Anyone can spot a bot-initiated thread immediately. And the human creators of the system don't seem to have English as their primary language.

The lack of English language skills is a tip-off, and i've long thought that this is a venture by someone in China. We had a completely unrelated bot here for a while which would parrot other people's posts. Initially, it was in the same thread, but later this bot would copy/paste a post from another thread. It's real dowfall came, though, when it initiated a thread of its own which was a copy/paste of an old thread. Not too subtle, that.

Most of these bots don't post again after setting up the account and doing the introductory post. But several of them have showed up much, much later with a long speil about some commercial subject. The creators are still inept, though. At least two of these bot accounts have started threads or responded to threads with long, commercially oriented posts; and, quixotically, they have also started threads to ask about the topics they covered in the other posts/threads. So, it appears to me that whoever is behind these bots is attempting to prefect a call and response technique, one which will allow them to send out bots to do viral marketing.

It's unlikely to work with native speakers of English. Anyone paying attention here over the last few years, though, will know that native speakers of English are a rapidly decreasing majority of the regularly posting members here. I suspect that vast numbers of real people who are members here who come to read but do not post are not native speakers of English. It wouldn't take very much more polishing to create bots which could fool them.

This thread (clickity-click!) is a perfect example of the call and response method of attempting to generate viral marketing. The idea is that other people will see this thread and think to themselves: "Hey, that's just what i need. I don't need to look any further for an naswer to my problem." The first response is the call, and the third response is the response to the call. The thread might have been pulled by the time you see this, but if not, it's a good example of exactly what these jokers are up to. It's inept, too. It's very blatant, it's about a subtle as getting hit in the head with a brick.

Set- Oh yeah, you have to be from Mars not to spot the question as a fake. It is about as subtle as Aunt Whatsherface from Abuzz.

There is another kind of thread that drives me nuts. That is the one where the writer presents a long, deeply felt, involved, convoluted problem, usually of a romantic subject,.................in one paragraph. When I see one of those, I check. I invariably find that it is the first post from that particular writer.

I know that sometimes the writer can be a very young person who does not know how to express himself properly in writing. And then again, as Dear Abby used to say, it could be some frat boys from Yale thinking that they are doing something hilarious.

That's the kind of thing those bots are intended for, Boss.