I’m contending they’re not spambots based on the pattern of posts to different forums that we see. You made the assertion that spambots exist that could produce that pattern; it’s up to you to provide evidence to support that assertion.
Like engineer_comp_geek, my impression that they are not spambots (or not entirely automated at least) is based on having banned hundreds (in engineer’s case many thousands) of the suckers. The fact that they concentrate on certain forums, and are clustered at certain days and times suggest that posts are not automatic. Also you would expect even more of them. When they first started, they would try to get off as many spam posts as possible before we banned the name and they had to use a new one. Now I rarely see more than one post made by the same username, even if for some reason it wasn’t banned for some time.
There might be, but I haven’t tried doing a count. One of our streaming spammers right now is posting links to sporting events, but another is posting links to movies and TV shows.
It seems as though they are pretty easy to spot as it is. I know when I see something titled “Synthesis Of Hybrid Bread Cakes Turns Peanut Butter Into Pipe Flanges” or the like, that it is spam.
The thing is, they’re definitely preferring GQ for some reason. Now, whether that’s bots preferring GQ or humans preferring GQ, I don’t know for sure, but there still must be some reason they’re preferring GQ, and I’d kind of like to figure out what that reason is. If they’re humans trying to capture as many eyeballs as possible, you’d think that they’d try to find the correct forum (self-promoting spammers usually do this). And if they do have a preference for one particular forum for whatever reason, why isn’t that preference absolute? It costs the same amount of effort to put a spam thread in any forum, so why not put it in the one they’ve decided is best?
The weirdest thing is that they appear to try to disguise themselves, but in totally ineffective ways. I can spot a spam thread instantly just from the title. Strangest of all is that recently they have been disguising spam as spam, advertising electronic equipment in the title but containing streaming links in the body. You would think they would get more people interested in their content if they just titled their threads “Get your streaming sports here!”
The streaming links are either for sports, which you would think would be more appropriate for The Game Room, or for movies and TV, which should go in Cafe Society if they were actually paying attention to forum descriptions.
I think it would be possible to program a bot to show more intelligent behavior than Mr. Smith and Mr. Hossain do.
I’m seeing less of late. It’s all down to timing, I think. If you come on the board at a time when few mods are around (basically when America sleeps) you may see more, all of which tend to vanish like early morning mists with the rising of the US sun.
It’s not just that: The spammers themselves have activity cycles, too (strong evidence that there’s at least some manual component to what they’re doing). We mods can still see the spam on the list after it’s nuked, and there’s a lot more of it early in the morning than later in the day.
I suspect that some boards have blacklists of some spam-related keywords, and that rather than trying to keep track of which boards have which blacklists, they just avoid those keywords altogether. This accounts for the subset which use oblique references to sports, like “With 11 men per side”, or the like: They’re avoiding the blacklists while still trying to get as close as they can to “get your streaming sports here”.
That could account for some of the random thread titles, but not for the fact that they are now using words like “smartphone” and other words which you think would be blacklisted in thread titles. And the streaming spam, whether for sports or movies, includes “Live Stream” in the link (but this is edited in after the thread is posted).
I’m wondering when they’re going to switch to bogus thread titles for Viagra.
(This said, I was astonished to find that one thread advertising iPhones actually was for iPhones.)
It may just be the time of day I’m on. It does seem that there is so much these days that running coach gets beaten to the punch by some other posters ;).
Almost certainly the time of day you’re on, which I believe is between the hours of 1AM EDT(US) and 8AM EDT(US). Almost all of the mods are US based(unfortunately). The Bangladesh spammers are virulent during those hours and usually only engineer_comp_geek is awake during those hours, and that only sporatically. So, the spam posted at that time sometimes remains until I get up and start banning about 6:30AM EDT(US).
During the US daylight hours the spam goes away a bit faster as we have 6-10 mods checking in quite often.
