[hibernate-dev] new generation of spambots in forums

[Sanne Grinovero]

yes I have admin rights; I'll delete this one.
I was writing about this to show the new kind of bot, it happens that,
while this one is obviously wrong, sometimes it looks like someone is
trying to be helpful and tries to  answer the question, a bit wrong,
but not so far. In these cases I'm not 100% sure if it's human or not,
to ban or not to ban :-) Also considering many users aren't very
fluent in english sometimes I don't know what to think if it.

It actually happened once that a bot, like this one, correctly quoted
the snippet containing the solution, answering to the user problem: it
probably uses the questions/error messages as key for a search.
But that only happened once, most of the time it writes BS quoting
some random stuff about Hibernate.

Sanne


2009/12/21 Emmanuel Bernard <emmanuel at hibernate.org>:
> Do you have admin levels (ie can delete the post)?
> If not, then I think we should give you that.
>
> On 21 déc. 2009, at 12:14, Sanne Grinovero wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>> since some months I've seen a raising rate of weird posts, like this one today:
>> https://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1001443
>>
>> It looks like there's some clever bot agent, as the post makes
>> _almost_ sense in the context but they always have a signature linking
>> to some website as advertising
>>
>> They're not very frequent AFAIK, still annoying.
>> I'm thinking the goal for such a bot is likely to rise the pagerank
>> than to make real advertising, also considering they're not very
>> frequent. It could make sense to ban links in posts, forcing people to
>> write them as text.
>> Sad.
>>
>> Sanne
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>
>