SpamBots on Message Boards

[Chrisjh0223]

Have you ever been to a forum and found a bot (or possibly a real human) advertising something? Sometimes they're funny and post the darndest things, but they're always attempting to solicit a product or service. Just last night, on RenX's General board a user by name of marybouchard made a topic title saying something like "Male Enhancement booster" and the message described what exactly the product was about (I probably could have screenshotted it for the lulz) with a photo of a sub-par model girl for Monster Energy drinks right below the body of text.

Imagine, a user looks at the title and thinks "Cool, enhancement gear for the male characters of RenX" when it turns out to just be (annoyingly) spam. And yes, the topic was taken down shortly afterwards either by a forum Patrol Bot (if the staff really does have a cool tool as such) or one of the administrators. I guess if a guest wanted to, we could report the post if a bot does this again (I'm not familiar at all with reporting posts on RenX forums as everyone behaves well and I have yet to see a moddable issue).

I saw the bot/person in question on the "Who's Online" list and CampinJeff was looking at marybouchard's profile according to his "current activity," so it looks like Jeff took care of the issue.

I've seen spambots on DS Ultimate forums back when those forums were alive, and they said some pretty funny things in their posts and even enabled post icons at random in several of their posts, not necessarily associated with the thing they were advertising (like unhappy Wario in a topic/post advertising watches). They would even come into a topic where we were discussing something (anything irrelevant to their solicitation) like FPS tropes and then immediately plop a post advertising whatever. Then Mr.Luigi said "AH HA HA HA! But yeah" A second poster (I think it was Benoit) said something like "<Botname>'s post is a good example of how hilarious and unexpected a spambot can be."

After seeing about 5 topics/posts made by the spambot(s) on DSU, I made a topic on the Site Suggestions board. I described the bots and their silly behavior and asked if they would implement anti-bot measures to prevent further spambotting. One of the site members said something like "Spam Bots are invading our forums? That sounds bad." TheUltimateKoopa clarified "Not all bots are bad, some are good. Some like Yahoo Slurp Bot and Google Crawler are essentially crawlers, observing text and data from the website so it shows up in their search results; that's how a good deal of people found DSU, by searching for ARDS codes and getting to here from Google. Only worry about other bots on the recent visitor section at the bottom of the page if the botname seems iffy." So one of the administrators on that site eventually said "We're not going to implement something to stop all the bots, as TUK mentioned some do only good. You just keep flagging their posts if you see any more advertisement bots."

Do you have any silly or interesting stories to share if you saw any spambots on other forums?

I did mention Post Icons from that site and most are available in the following zip folder here:

https://www.mediafire.com/?y1w1tvnynafci8o

Not all of them were saved/archived (such as the Pumpkin Zone) but it's a great deal of what we had. It's mostly about video gamer stuff, such as things from Nintendo games. Some forums allow you to use a post icon such as a light bulb, question mark, or various office symbols (DSU got those alongside a major forum conversion a few years later) but when it first came out, the administrator of the DSU website really loved Nintendo and with that one version of the forum software was able to use the cute little Post Icons from that folder.

[RoundShades]

All I can say, is I was not up last night, but usually am, and have flagged 4 advertisement bots in the last month. It's literally the only reason I'm a moderator, for more night coverage. Though, it's legacy, as before, we used to have to manually delete post, and then post username to an inbox message so a real admin (Agent) can delete user. Now. deleting the post is optional, but the user profile now has "flag profile as spammer", and it automates hiding their messages and locking their messaging privileges until Agent accepts the flag resulting in a user content wipe.

The only things I can really say about it, are that bots have no business posting in these forums but can enjoy "lurking", and that this is truly an interesting day and age with programs that simulate human browsing and typing, especially the more sophisticated Google ones that learn profanity from 4chan.