Metal Reviews

There's many things I don't understand either.

that may be the best explanation i have ever received.

I was going to explain it to you, but you seem satisfied now so I'll leave it.

no no please explain.

You probably noticed how in the general music discussion forum there were like 6 or 7 threads that were by new members, and were about like new movies coming out and shit?

Those were spam bots. Normally one of the mods would zap them out of existence fairly quickly, but today they seemed to linger around for a while, that's what he was talking about.

i hate not being in the loop.

oh. how do you zap a bot? im curious.

so you just keep zapping them? how can we get rid of them completely and who puts them here?

Oh, it's nothing special. One of the mods just deletes their account and deletes the threads the started.

They put themselves here. It's like some asshole somewhere writes a program and then that program goes around automatically signing up to forums and posting pre-determined posts with links to whatever they're advertising.

Sometimes they get creepily smart, trying to act like real people. They find posts on the forum and copy them, but using slightly different words. Like it might take a sentence and replace the word "fast" with "quick" and "big" with "large" or something like that.

Usually it comes out sounding retarted though so you can still tell its a bot.

As for how to stop it, it will require a major overhaul of the forum sign-up process. We need to add in one of those text boxes that asks you to type the word you see in the image. Thats the best way to avoid bots since they're not smart enough to fill that shit in.

so does someone put them here? how does this happen. and if someone doesnt put them here how do they get here?

really? thats kind of amazing. so some guy writes a program and the bot is set loose on the internet and they end up here? interesting. what if the staff here made it so new people cant post a new thread till they post like 50 times. then the bots would get confused maybe...

I believe the spambots are created to target specific message board software. For example this forum is run on phpBB, which is one of the most commonly used so all they'd have to do is make a spambot that finds message boards using phpBB and voila. It happens a lot.

They would still post bullcrap in other people's threads. That's happened before a few times.

There was one hilarious bot that just joined into a thread and made the comment that The Annoying Frenchman is not very nice. Underneath there was a link to something.

Pretty amusing.

so the spambots post spam. what do the owners of the spambots get out of the deal. like why do they spam are they getting paid?

i just cracked up reading this. ahhhh i needed that hahaheheh

Well they're being paid to advertise shit by the companies who want to advertise all over the internet, I guess.

A lot of the links they post are viruses, money-making schemes, and shit like that.

i see. so it could be a hacker or whatever trying to infect your computer and get your info type of thing as well.

Uh, yeah actually that probably makes more sense than what I said.