Reality Factory

What do you think is the purpose of forum spam? I know that people how advertise viagra, free lotteries and stuff get good money for that, but what about forum spambots? They just write something pointless like "Let's get aquainted, My name is Tomas' or 'whitch info can I trust in this forum?'. Do they get money for that? Or someone enjoys making those noncense? I'd like to hear your opinion. G'night

I think it's just the work of a bunch of script kiddies with too much time on their hands. The type that skip school so they can play video games and post stupid stuff on the internet.

yea, someone with too much time on their hands, and speaking of such a person. Someone created a site for tracking USD. Interesting huh?
http://www.wheresgeorge.com

You know how people pay extra for guaranteed delivery of packages, etc? I think the "Hello my name is Thomas" posts are a method of guaranteed delivery for advertisers.

Basically, they post something human and innocent looking, and the bot watches the post. If there are responses, they know the forum is active and that their script to post stuff on this forum works, so they can demand a higher rate from advertisers for posts guaranteed to show up.

Just a wild guess.

AndyCR wrote:You know how people pay extra for guaranteed delivery of packages, etc? I think the "Hello my name is Thomas" posts are a method of guaranteed delivery for advertisers.

Basically, they post something human and innocent looking, and the bot watches the post. If there are responses, they know the forum is active and that their script to post stuff on this forum works, so they can demand a higher rate from advertisers for posts guaranteed to show up.

Just a wild guess.

Yeah, that could be true

hmm, maybe. Well, at least I haven't seen any REAL spambots here. Just when you guys thought my friend was a spambot.

They exist. Sometimes I delete about 10 posts from them a week... Glad you haven't seen them!

Hehe, I saw the one about the "Jessica Biel in a Bikini"...

I've seen lots of them, like that one in my first post 'Hello, my name is Tomas' is the one I saw here

wow. Nobody has spammed my forum. So they do exist on these forums. Well, I don't know how close this forum still is with the PHP free forum provider, but Supposedly all the admins of a php forum just got an E-Mail about a new spam resistant program. So you might be seeing fewer spambots. You'll see fewer if Questofdreams got the same E-Mail. Although since php supplies so many forums, they can probably crack one and then spam em' all.

hey!!! the word filters killed a word that wasn't swearing or anything!!!!
is that a filter clitch?

and ten minutes ago, I got this

php forums wrote:Hi all just a quick update on the new spam bot mods.

We have removed the original one we emailed you about yesterday and have now put in place a new one.

The new mod is just on your forum registration form you will see it if you have a look, it will stop bots registering to your forum in the first place and you will also get emails stating that a spam bot has tried to register.