Confess my caving is within Other Area...

[Peter Burgess]

It's very good. I reckon all the mods are bots.

 

[TheBitterEnd]

...
Personally I think his posts have brought a welcome bit of colour and character to the forum.

... which otherwise is so sadly lacking in those attributes ?  Hmmm...  :-\

Well compared to some other sites I frequent, outside of a good Access fracas and certainly over the last few weeks, it has been a bit dry and stale round here. I say take him off moderated posts before we end up banging on about the tabloid press again...

 

[AR]

We could always innundate him (it) with pm's?

Now there's a thought, given the content of the postings so far I might send the lyrics to several Half Man Half Biscuit songs on the grounds that they're on the same wavelength....

 

[Peter Burgess]

This one is the giveaway. First post :

First sentence - poor attempt to say "hello, this is my first post".
Second sentence - inability to see that Cryptic Caves does not refer to a real specific cave.

Are new arrival to ukCaving.  Have people excavated in or outside Cryptic for new discovery prospect?  With what success?

As a diversion, Honest John provides limited scope for filling time on a quiet day.  It exercises a few brain cells for a day. Then it gets boring.

 

[Blakethwaite]

Now there's a thought, given the content of the postings so far I might send the lyrics to several Half Man Half Biscuit songs on the grounds that they're on the same wavelength....

I'd strongly dispute the notion that the drivel in question even vaguely resembles the quality that is HMHB however the last verse of Get Kramer would seem apt for this forum!

This land is my land
This land is not your land
So please get off now or I?ll go and fetch the farm hand

 

[robjones]

Over on the "Large sea cave in Shetland" thread, MMilner commented "It appears to be a spambot, a clever one, but not clever enough. Don't see anything in it's posts which appear to be human, just posting  facts relating to any topic where it can find a keyword or phrase to latch onto. Don't see the point myself!" [my emphasis]

Maybe  its part of an under- or post-grad project  where marks will be given for the numbers of replies obtained - in which case the originator would be doing tolerably well here on UKC!  (or is it  ?)

 

[graham]

Yeah but if all the responses are coming from all us other spambots, then it must count as a fail, surely.  :-\

 

[Peter Burgess]

Is the idea to CREATE a spambot, or PRETEND to be one?

 

[Lazarus]

Good god, it really is a sad state of affairs when people (are they real?) are discussing spam-bots. Do cavers(?) have so little to talk about?

To be honest, not Honest John, I would have expected a link in the post, profile or signature to justify its actions (to propagate spam-links). All seems rather pointless otherwise 

 

[martinm]

Here is an example of a spam message (I won'tinclude any links or owt) I got today for comparison with HJ:-

Subject:- ALL Natural, 30% HEMP, NO THC- in a bottle

Message (part):- The derivative of a function of a real
variable measures the sensitivity to change of a quantity (a function or dependent variable)
which is determined by another quantity (the independent variable).

"The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity" wrote WB Yeats after the First World War, in anticipation of the Second. 0 is a sizeable quake for this area. He says there haven't been reports of injuries or people stranded in their cars, but there are numerous flat tires from motorists driving over damaged roads.

There are links in the email which i am NOT going to click on. Laughable... 

 

[glyders]

I had pondered on a furren type making use of Google translate.

 

[bograt]

I had pondered on a furren type making use of Google translate.

Must admit, this thought had crossed my mind as well. :-\

 

[glyders]

Though with the whole body of work I'm more tending towards a Turing Test Bot, not necessarily SpamBot or anything otherwise suspicious.
There is one short post from HonestJohn which hangs together well. If the above theory is correct I suspect this was its creator.

 

[Bartleby]

Some people do post in an odd, flowery, flamboyant, bizzare way on forums, yet write perfectly intelligent emails!.  No idea why though, maybe they think it's "hilarious"?!?!

 

[mrodoc]

I think it would be fun to do a reverse Turing and pretend to be a spam bot 8)

 

[Pipster]

Good god, it really is a sad state of affairs when people (are they real?) are discussing spam-bots. Do cavers(?) have so little to talk about?

I think you've missed the point. We'd all sooner be doing something far more constructive then having to sieve our way through masses of bollocks spam.

To be honest, not Honest John, I would have expected a link in the post, profile or signature to justify its actions (to propagate spam-links). All seems rather pointless otherwise 

Some spam bots initially present themselves as being innocent and attempt to gain trust - and after a certain amount of time will then start posting spam links. Imagine a bot that posts 100's of "messages" and then changes the signature - all of a sudden you've got 100's of links (on possibly 100's of pages). Much better (for the spammers point of view) than posting a single message and link (and ban).

Not all spam bots are for profit (i.e. links) - some are there just to annoy people (like viruses), sometimes they are designed just to annoy users of a particular peice of software like smf which this forum uses.