Who are all these guests?
Who are all these guests?
Anyone ever wonder why we can sometimes have around 50 people watching the forum? How's that work/happen?
- chaoadventures
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Re: Who are all these guests?
I'm pretty sure 90% of them are spam bots, which I believe were the reason Mooncow shut down registering accounts for a while.
Basically, they're trying to make posts but can't.
Basically, they're trying to make posts but can't.
Re: Who are all these guests?
We've had bots before, and they tend to just be funny when they are able to post.
What I wonder is if hidden users list as guests or not. Or if any members browse the site while signed out and only sign in if they feel like posting. I don't sign in when I'm reading on mobile most of the time, so there could be folks like that. But that would just explain the chunk that aren't bots.
I also feel like there are people who just never register on forum and like to read them. But that's hard to confirm.
What I wonder is if hidden users list as guests or not. Or if any members browse the site while signed out and only sign in if they feel like posting. I don't sign in when I'm reading on mobile most of the time, so there could be folks like that. But that would just explain the chunk that aren't bots.
I also feel like there are people who just never register on forum and like to read them. But that's hard to confirm.
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Re: Who are all these guests?
Wait a minute, if we have bots that are active members why don't we ban them? Are they giving the website money so that it stays afloat?
- SwifterTheDragon
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Re: Who are all these guests?
Crazo3077 wrote:We've had bots before, and they tend to just be funny when they are able to post.
What would bots post then? Advertisements? An attempt to post so much and crash servers? Why don't people make actual accounts, get enough actual posts to post without mods, then make it into a spam bot? What do people even get out of making bots? Money somehow?
Re: Who are all these guests?
Bots that make accounts, and are actually able to post, rarely post anything good, but it tends to be funny. Most of the time they post advertisements that read like jumbled garbage, likely because they are broken in some way, or designed to input anything that will allow them to post.
My favorite memory, if it can be trusted, was waking up to find that a Russian bot had posted what I believe were advertisements for some kind of mature content service. In addition to large blocks of text, they had would have inappropriate pictures. I forget if I was still a moderator at the time, but I remember talking about it with moderators.
Honestly if a moderator wanted to, they might be able to find some bot posts in the forum's hidden junkyard. Unless they changed it recently, moderators do not actually delete removed posts, instead moving them to a board that no one but they can access. But Mooncow probably has that area cleared out once in a while, since it'd be a waste to just save that data forever.
My favorite memory, if it can be trusted, was waking up to find that a Russian bot had posted what I believe were advertisements for some kind of mature content service. In addition to large blocks of text, they had would have inappropriate pictures. I forget if I was still a moderator at the time, but I remember talking about it with moderators.
Honestly if a moderator wanted to, they might be able to find some bot posts in the forum's hidden junkyard. Unless they changed it recently, moderators do not actually delete removed posts, instead moving them to a board that no one but they can access. But Mooncow probably has that area cleared out once in a while, since it'd be a waste to just save that data forever.
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Re: Who are all these guests?
i think my question wasn't addressed.
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Re: Who are all these guests?
I'm talking about ones like googlebot
- Jeffery Mewtamer
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Re: Who are all these guests?
Search Engines use bots to crawl websites and add pages to the search engine's index. By registering on sites such as this, such bots are able to index pages that are only accessible to logged in members. Naturally, there's always the possibility a bot with a search engine in its screen name isn't actually a web crawler for that search engine, but I'm willing to give any bot that doesn't spam the forums the benefit of the doubt.
As for the advertising spambot, the incentive, like with many spam e-mails, is that deploying such a bot costs almost nothing, and given a large enough target pool, even if only 1-in-10,000 people fall for your pitch, the payoff can be quite lucrative.
Of course, some bots are designed just to annoy people without the bot master investing their own time, and some are just there to test AI linguistics.
As for the advertising spambot, the incentive, like with many spam e-mails, is that deploying such a bot costs almost nothing, and given a large enough target pool, even if only 1-in-10,000 people fall for your pitch, the payoff can be quite lucrative.
Of course, some bots are designed just to annoy people without the bot master investing their own time, and some are just there to test AI linguistics.
Re: Who are all these guests?
I didn't have a good way to phrase this last night, but something came to mind while rereading the thread.SwifterTheDragon wrote:Why don't people make actual accounts, get enough actual posts to post without mods, then make it into a spam bot? What do people even get out of making bots? Money somehow?
Do you ever get phone calls that are a machine talking about your credit card or a chance to win something, that are very obviously fake? Or the legendary emails from foreign prices who want to give you money, but you have to send him money first? These are designed with fairly obvious holes because they want the most ignorant of people to respond to these advertisements in order to take advantage of them. This is done as a low cost effort: if minimal effort can be put in, and anything can be achieved, they're going for it.
Spambots that advertise content run on a similar notion. There isn't a finely targeted audience for their content, so they just spread the word however they can. A bot can do this quickly and cheaply, but obviously looks fake when it finally posts something. But the time investment of a person who has to actually read and input information, build social bonds or a social standing, and then suddenly come down with advertisements, is only a smart strategy if you know the audience will want the product.
Now even with a targeted audience, there is an ethical concern over someone joining a forum solely as a sales representative, as it may result in emotional manipulation for the gain of a sale, rather than out of a desire to socially bond or work toward that online community's goals. And again, it is a big time investment, with unclear promises of rewards. That's why bots kinda take the cake there.
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