[dominicjohnson]

I've noticed these pop up more and more recently. Look at the last post on this page:

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...sion-page.html

It's a spam bot that picks up on keywords, creates an account (or uses one made by humans/BugMeNot) and writes a generic response that has been pre-created based on those keywords. Either that or it's a really ****ing dumb spam-posting human.

At the end of the post there is always a couple of links. But what really annoys me is the way that what they're saying isn't actually anything that's being discussed, just about a keyword that has popped up.

If you read the thread that I posted, it's about whether, after someone pays for something on your website with PayPal, using the return URL is a good place to measure conversion (turns out you can just auto-redirect back to it, so yes it is). Then this spam bot picks up on the word "convert" and splurges out a bunch of rubbish!

I just want to find out who writes these bots and be like "in what world is this remotely on-topic/going to work?!". I'd prefer a flashing advert saying i'm the millionth viewer and entitled to riches quite frankly.

[DarkWhite]

(Original post by dominicjohnson)
I've noticed these pop up more and more recently. Look at the last post on this page:

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...sion-page.html

It's a spam bot that picks up on keywords, creates an account (or uses one made by humans/BugMeNot) and writes a generic response that has been pre-created based on those keywords. Either that or it's a really ****ing dumb spam-posting human.

At the end of the post there is always a couple of links. But what really annoys me is the way that what they're saying isn't actually anything that's being discussed, just about a keyword that has popped up.

If you read the thread that I posted, it's about whether, after someone pays for something on your website with PayPal, using the return URL is a good place to measure conversion (turns out you can just auto-redirect back to it, so yes it is). Then this spam bot picks up on the word "convert" and splurges out a bunch of rubbish!

I just want to find out who writes these bots and be like "in what world is this remotely on-topic/going to work?!". I'd prefer a flashing advert saying i'm the millionth viewer and entitled to riches quite frankly.

These kind of bots have been around for decades now, which shows that they must be working to some extent.

To be fair to the creators/users of them, they're a really simple way to get traffic to your site - you just set it off crawling the web, it registers and posts on your behalf, and more advanced websites might ask the user to fill out a CAPTCHA image which could can hire people to do all day for about $30/1000 CAPTCHAs. Without anyone even clicking it, it will mean their site shows up higher in search results because of the number and quality of links pointing to their site. People clicking on the links in the spam posts is a strike between an objective and a bonus.

I imagine lots of people will click them, either accidentally or on purpose; coupled with a few ads, that's easy revenue!

[dominicjohnson]

(Original post by DarkWhite)
These kind of bots have been around for decades now, which shows that they must be working to some extent.

To be fair to the creators/users of them, they're a really simple way to get traffic to your site - you just set it off crawling the web, it registers and posts on your behalf, and more advanced websites might ask the user to fill out a CAPTCHA image which could can hire people to do all day for about $30/1000 CAPTCHAs. Without anyone even clicking it, it will mean their site shows up higher in search results because of the number and quality of links pointing to their site. People clicking on the links in the spam posts is a strike between an objective and a bonus.

I imagine lots of people will click them, either accidentally or on purpose; coupled with a few ads, that's easy revenue!

I want to skin them alive.

[Dez]

TSR gets a lot of these, normally they get swatted before being published on the site, or not long after. Millions of people read these websites, so it's a very powerful way of getting exposure. Spam bots love it. They're like wasps swarming a honey pot.