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Ladies and gentlemen, the future of spambots
The Reverend Dr Galactus
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This is probably something that has been going on for awhile and the mods are well aware of it, but I was quite fascinated to see it in action at PA. In the Zen Pinball thread over in G&T, a strange post popped up today:
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showpost.php?p=11944096&postcount=70
It seemed out-of-place and characteristic of a spammer (especially the presumably ad-link sig), so I checked out the user's page, and indeed, he had joined today and had two posts. His other post, however, seemed slightly more cogent and related to the discussion over in D&D. It got responses. What kind of spammer could this be, trying to make a reasoned argument in one thread and randomly rambling in another?
Or... could this be a bot doing cross-searches for keywords between forums and performing copypasta automata as social camouflage?
I ran a search for a passage from the G&T post and what do you know:
http://www.xboxworld.com.au/forum/showpost.php?p=731609&postcount=11
A thread about Zen Software's previous pinball game for the 360, that had gone off-topic. Presumably the British CCTV thread where the D&D post had come from had not strayed so far.
Much as I despise spam, it's fascinating to see the resourcefulness that goes into trying to do it.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showpost.php?p=11944096&postcount=70
It seemed out-of-place and characteristic of a spammer (especially the presumably ad-link sig), so I checked out the user's page, and indeed, he had joined today and had two posts. His other post, however, seemed slightly more cogent and related to the discussion over in D&D. It got responses. What kind of spammer could this be, trying to make a reasoned argument in one thread and randomly rambling in another?
Or... could this be a bot doing cross-searches for keywords between forums and performing copypasta automata as social camouflage?
I ran a search for a passage from the G&T post and what do you know:
http://www.xboxworld.com.au/forum/showpost.php?p=731609&postcount=11
A thread about Zen Software's previous pinball game for the 360, that had gone off-topic. Presumably the British CCTV thread where the D&D post had come from had not strayed so far.
Much as I despise spam, it's fascinating to see the resourcefulness that goes into trying to do it.
The Reverend Dr Galactus on
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On the other hand, it gives other posters here a better idea of what to look out for so they can report it.
When the spammer starts copy/pasting Machiavelli to sell his site you know it's good
I think the true future of spambots is former goldfarming firms in China turned into places where people register on boards and spam paid messages.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Wait accurately answered like gave an answer as to why he wasn't a spammer, or put in the field "Nah man, I actually am a spammer"?
My guess? What DarkPrimus said. A lot of spam bots are really people paid to spam message boards.
This is pretty much what happened in the link I posted. Until it went crazy.
This has been the case for several years. The vast majority of spam we get is real people, the computers don't get through the registration process. It's why stopping it isn't as simple as putting some trick in registration. Anything tough enough to fox the spammers is tough enough to fox legitimate users.
But do we care about the really stupid users anyways?
The kind of things that stop human spammers will stop smart people too.
That's enough to give someone an aneurysm.
I suppose even spammers can like the comic.
Holy shit, I had my first encounter with that shit a couple days ago. Those are so hard to read.
No doubt someone will come along shortly and prove why this particular Captcha is properly a team effort.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Oh christ, I fucking hate these. They've gotten so fucking hard on some sites, I can't even decipher what they are.
When your anti-spambot tech is foiling real humans, it's time to rethink your approach.
Edit: I think it was the recent gmail account I created. I spent five minutes just typing in what I thought the word was, and getting it wrong over and over and over, until finally I guessed correctly.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Errm
IFFA77C ?
Oh yeah look it's a sailboat.
ITT Mr. Mikey outs himself as a robot.
You dumb bastard; it's a schooner, not a sailboat.
Fuck. That captcha falls right into the point where I'm colorblind.
You're really not missing much. I think it reads 4XP14ZC*, but I'm even less confident in the Z than the other characters. It might not even be there!
* after a bit of image editing...
So now I know what the makers of Space Giraffe have been up to recently, and it's still migraine-inducing.