What's up with all these spam/porn/advert bots?

[Prussian to the Iron]

ive been noticing an alarming spike of many spam bots, porn spamming bots, and advertising bots on this site. what the heck is going on?

are they going from website to website and this will all be over in a little while when they find another place to spam it up? or is this more of a:
"we want to get as many people as possible to look at our porn so they will get caught by someone aand never be allowed on the .org again!"
sort of thing?

i'm getting kinda sick and tired of these man! plus the amounts of instagibbing is dramatically increasing too.........

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

believe me, i like my porn, but it does not belong on this forum. not to mention they are not free sites and so are also advertising and making me sadfaic for not being able to view anything

[A Very Super Market]

The bots can't read, and the admins aren't putting them up. This post is completely useless. You do realize that the forum has been suffering numerous attacks for a while, and taking the entire site down, right? This is another side-effect of it. Simply ignore the spam, since they're pretty obvious.

[Prussian to the Iron]

i know they can't read.........and quite obviusly the admins aren't putting them up. i'm not stupid.

i was just wondering why this site in particular is being targeted?

[A Very Super Market]

The bots can't read, and the admins aren't putting them up. This post is completely useless. You do realize that the forum has been suffering numerous attacks for a while, and taking the entire site down, right? This is another side-effect of it. Simply ignore the spam, since they're pretty obvious.

[Prussian to the Iron]

i know that, i just didn't think that random bot acounts could be set up and spam porn and adverts because of it.

[Makanyane]

i know that, i just didn't think that random bot acounts could be set up and spam porn and adverts because of it.

they can, the people behind spam advertising make a science out of producing forum spamming bots, and anywhere that can have replies posted will be targeted

most forum sites have a variety of different mechanisms like 'read this image and type out the letters' as protections when new accounts are made or first posts with URLs /images are posted, to try and sort the bots from the humans.... I suspect some of our protections broke when the site last went down but are hopefully due to be fixed soon, so normal service should be resumed...

[Prussian to the Iron]

pehaps more 'first leter in Medieval' style questions?

for some reason i can never get the squiggly-letter things. i have to continually fail it so i can get on ei understand :\

[Makanyane]

pehaps more 'first leter in Medieval' style questions?

for some reason i can never get the squiggly-letter things. i have to continually fail it so i can get on ei understand :\

hehe, there is one of the download sites that I've never managed to use because their squiggly letter thing is so weird I've never got the right answer yet either....

[frogbeastegg]

Squiggly writing is nothing. At one point a website I use was displaying images which didn't match the answer 9 times out of 10, so it was next to impossible to get the answer right.

A few things have been tweaked and we should see a drop off in bot activity now.

[caravel]

hehe, there is one of the download sites that I've never managed to use because their squiggly letter thing is so weird I've never got the right answer yet either....

I'm glad I'm not the only person that has problems with those anti robotic registration things...

[FactionHeir]

they can, the people behind spam advertising make a science out of producing forum spamming bots, and anywhere that can have replies posted will be targeted

most forum sites have a variety of different mechanisms like 'read this image and type out the letters' as protections when new accounts are made or first posts with URLs /images are posted, to try and sort the bots from the humans.... I suspect some of our protections broke when the site last went down but are hopefully due to be fixed soon, so normal service should be resumed...

It was quite bad at our other forum as well last year until we finally got the admins to implement some anti bot measures.

The most annoying bots are those with link signatures which you can't block unless you prvent everyone from having a signature without explicit mod approval. So even after you ban those guys, their links still show up in their profiles and can get indexed by search engines.

[Tellos Athenaios]

That is what the nofollow option is for in robots.txt and others. (I tells search engines *not* to follow those links which should prevent their intended purpose of generating more traffic to whatever advert/malware sites they link to.)