THE BOTS ARE GETTING SCARY . . .

Here's the thread to which i responded. When i read it originally, it was signed "Lucy James," but while i was responding, the signature was changed to "Michael Ehard." That makes it seem to me to be under the control of a human, at least initially. Perhaps they're still working up their bullshit, trying to perfect it.

Yeah, there's a captcha. Some are so cryptic I have to make three attempts before I get one I can read.

I should change from roger to robot, but my last name change request was ignored, anyway.

That tells us something about how they're running their bot program. It means that a human is required to register the bot. There are, however, several clues that one is dealing with a bot, but i'm not going to post them here, because i don't intend to help them perfect their gig.

Yes, but the captcha for this site is not as difficult to decipher as some I've encountered in other websites.


Jumping over captcha without human intervention can be done using optical character recognition software.
Here is likely one of the "designers" or knows one of the designers of these bots:
http://able2know.org/topic/200087-1

Maybe, but i think that the people running these bots are Chinese, because in the beginning their English was god-awful. One of the accounts is now using a photo avatar, which looks very much like a Chinese gentleman. Although it's not as it was back in the 40s and 50s, finding someone in India who speaks English well isn't that difficult.

I read yesterday that there are more speakers of English in China than elsewhere on the planet. True or false, there are likely a good many that are proficient.

Yeah, i had thought about that, too. But whoever started this program here wasn't one of them. Completing a course and getting a certificate doesn't mean that they can speak like a native-speaker. I am reminded of my early efforts in French. I taught myself to read French when i was about 13, and soon because nearly as proficient as i was in reading English. Then i tried to speak French--i was mortified at the reaction. Native speakers of French often had no clue what i was trying to say. It was so bad that for more than a decade, i didn't even try to speak French. I only became proficient when i lived with and worked for native speakers of French. Now, as i don't use it often, it's slipping away again.

Why do we think they're bots?

I think they're just people.

I don't know one way or another, but changing a name is certainly more a human than a bot thing.

Bots are more in terms of page views (bots that search the web for stuff), not content, as far as I know.

Yes, as far as you know. I have no doubt that there's human supervision, which is why i asked about captchas. It would probably require a human to successfully register if a captcha is required, although there are allegedly programs which can complete captchas. The boilerplate character of the "introduction new member" threads, of which we've had a spate since the spring, suggests to me that a person or a group of people are attempting to prefect a bot program, and the purpose would be marketing. I don't know what you think about it, and don't particularly care--but i don't want to see the site overrun by marketing attempts. We get enough of that as it is.

OK. Mostly, I keep seeing reference to "bots" as generators of content, and wonder if that came from things I've said about bots being page views (when people have freaked out about how many times a thread has been viewed vs. responded to, or how many people are "lurking" vs. how many seem to actually be participating.)

I'm pretty sure about that part (bots searching the web and registering pageviews and such) but personally don't have any information about bots generating content. As far as I know it's just plain humans, copying and pasting and such.

We may well be seeing the early days of an attempt to use bots to generate content. The accounts which have been opened here were first speculated upon as being bots because of the boilerplate nature of the "introduction new member" threads. Since that time, there has been some rather strange posting--Jespah has caught several of these instances. One of these accounts will express an interest in a topic, more or less asking a question. Then Jespah comes along an points out that the very same account has already once posted a detailed description of the subject in which it has subsequently expressed an interest. Obviously, there's a lot of bugs in their system.

However, this is not the usual call and response attempt to get viral marketing going. So far, as far as i've seen, the jokers never come back with a link. With human supervision, though, it could be very effective if they ever work the kinds out. The human writes the content, and then bot A, which is registered at several different sites, goes and drops off the content. Meanwhile, human is writing content for bot B, and so on, and so on . . .

It bothers me that they're attempting to make it sufficiently plausible that one might not spot the bots. There are several telltale signs of a bot that they show, but i'm not posting it here for the jokers to come learn how they're tipping their hands.

Or, they come back with a link and the mods get that as spam.

Oh course, that's possible. However, i start posting in the early AM when most of the spam is posted, and so far, i've not seen any of it being done by the accounts i believe are bots. The bot accounts seem to be attempting to generate interest in a specific topic, as opposed to attempting to get people to click on a link.

Think of the children!!!!

Something must be done!

The place really is getting weird. I'm reporting fewer 'suspicious' threads, just marking them down and moving on. Someone with more energy/interest can deal with reporting.

I was sleuthing around about this last night... http://able2know.org/topic/201401-1#post-5184212

A little more info: http://xrumerschool.com/what-is-xrumer

Best Regards,
Thack45

The Bots are only going to get better as well.

I have suggested before that the only way to really stop this type of stuff (including annoying humans who just want to "drive by" and drop a nasty post and run away), is to charge some minimal fee for joining (like $1). But nobody liked that idea.

90% or more of the Email that now flows over the Internet is SPAM, and it won't be long before a similar percentage of forum posts are going to be the same.

(just my opinion of course)

That looks plausible. I've been offline for nearly an hour now from what Kaspersky is calling a network attack. It's those bot, i know it is.

Some forum-type websites require people to be members for some period of time/make a certain number of posts before they can start their own threads/add links. That approach was one of the big upsides of the forums from the Taunton group of companies. The mods commented that it was comparatively easy to manage as they didn't have to deal with much spam - they were able to moderate discussions rather than spend time shovelling spam.

There are ways to manage/control the spam. The site owner/s have to determine if they value that, and the site members have to decide if they can tolerate the spam. We all have to make our own choices.