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What is the point of spambots? [solved for real this time]
BladeX
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Okay, seriously, this might be a really stupid question that has been bugging me for awhile but after that girl thread got randomly necroposted by a spambot I just have to ask. What the hell is the point of some of these spambots?
I get the ones that email you or post on a forum and have: "lulz go here to make your johnson bigger *url here*". It's very shitty advertising but at least it tells you what the product is and gives a web address. I don't mean those ones. I mean the ones that seem like they are putting in random poetry or paragraphs of nonsense to get by the spam filter but then never advertise anything.. I'll use the girl thread bot as an example:
WHAT THE FUCK does that even mean? Are they trying to advertise a TV show? What TV show then? They never say. Is it advertising mouthwash? Well again they never say. Please tell me there's a simple explanation for this shit that I'm missing because I do not get the point. Is the answer that these types of bots aren't even advertising and it's just some moron who has too much time on their hands so they annoy the shit out of people for fun?
EDIT: Well that was quick, thanks guys!
EDIT2: Sorry mods, I put solved prematurely. I'd like to if I can withdraw that for a bit to see if I was indeed just missing the urls in the emails or if other people have received these messages with no urls because I'd really be curious as to what purpose those serve if indeed I'm not crazy and the messages have NO urls..
EDIT3: Echo's link and seasleepy's post answered in detail the reasoning for the no URL email messages. Solved for realz! Can be locked.
I get the ones that email you or post on a forum and have: "lulz go here to make your johnson bigger *url here*". It's very shitty advertising but at least it tells you what the product is and gives a web address. I don't mean those ones. I mean the ones that seem like they are putting in random poetry or paragraphs of nonsense to get by the spam filter but then never advertise anything.. I'll use the girl thread bot as an example:
Janessa Caitlin wrote: »I look forward to the topics on today's show. One of the topics is telling someone they have bad breath. I had a gentleman friend who was very nice and a proud person but began having nauseating bad breath. It was impossible to kiss him without becoming sick. I debated about telling him and I referred to the topic on the internet and read different points of view on the topic. Finally I decided to tell him over the phone to eliminate his embarrassment. I framed my statements very carefully. He had heart bypass surgery in the past and also ate foods way past time I would ever consider consuming. Also, he had sinus issues. So, there could have been legitimate issues. I told him something had changed and I was not sure he was aware of it. I asked him when his next dental appointment was and tactfully told him. The next couple of times I was around him it was some better and then it began getting bad again. It is something else to sit next to someone in church and it is obvious there is a problem muchless to kiss this person. Several weeks later I decided I could no longer tolerate it and began the process of just becoming friends. He told me at that time I had hurt his feelings and I probably did not even remember. I asked him to tell me what it was. He said when I told him about his breath. I said it was a real problem and I debated about telling him and I did so in the kindest way I could under the circumstances. He said he had used some mouthwash his dentist gave him and it was supposed to take care of it. I said obviously there was a problem and because it had surfaced again. From my viewpoint I did the right thing. If I had bad breath I certainly would want someone to tell me. I would not get upset. I would definitely do something about it.
WHAT THE FUCK does that even mean? Are they trying to advertise a TV show? What TV show then? They never say. Is it advertising mouthwash? Well again they never say. Please tell me there's a simple explanation for this shit that I'm missing because I do not get the point. Is the answer that these types of bots aren't even advertising and it's just some moron who has too much time on their hands so they annoy the shit out of people for fun?
EDIT: Well that was quick, thanks guys!
EDIT2: Sorry mods, I put solved prematurely. I'd like to if I can withdraw that for a bit to see if I was indeed just missing the urls in the emails or if other people have received these messages with no urls because I'd really be curious as to what purpose those serve if indeed I'm not crazy and the messages have NO urls..
EDIT3: Echo's link and seasleepy's post answered in detail the reasoning for the no URL email messages. Solved for realz! Can be locked.
BladeX on
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This discussion has been closed.
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I saw a hilarious example of via a D&D post, someone had linked an article about the effeciency of the space shuttle code. The article was from 2007 or so, but there were a bunch of recent comments, all basically saying " hey I agree with your point on (completely random sentence copied from the article), go to (random website) for further discussion. It was an entire conversation between competing spambots.
On a busy site like PA, they're trying to get people to click their links out of curiosity, but they're going to spam even poorly-trafficked message boards in hopes of getting whatever page they linked ranked highly on various search engines.
I'm a little afraid of when/if it gets to a point where it gets hard to tell and instead of a necropost they respond to a current thread such as this one with:
and then bots quote bots and start having conversations and oh shit it's skynet.*
and Pellaeon I think I saw that article linked in D&D, funny stuff.
*Totally not overreacting. Totally.
But in the OP he wrote something a spambot sent you that has NO link attached to it. So what does it serve?
EDIT: Unless other people have received messages in which they are 100% sure there were no URLS. In which case I would like urahonky's question answered out of curiosity.
I don't think this would be the main tactic of spamming on forums though, since I don't think there's that well-developed filtering for most forum software -- you're just going to want to put in a link and hope the forum isn't well-moderated.
Probably Bayesian poisoning.
Ooooohhh, that makes a whole lot of sense then, thanks! Now I think I can confidently put solved. Sorry for prematurely putting solved then removing it before!