PSA: do not post in off topic, it is for spam bots only

[MichaelBenjamin]

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[deraudrl]

You know that, the moderators know that, I know that...
the spammers, not so much.

[MichaelBenjamin]

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[deraudrl]

the spammers are not people they are bots, they do not analyse the stuff that is there and understand it.
they just post crap after crap, automated.

Why would someone releasing such a bot into the wild restrict it to the off-topic subforums of any particular site? They don't, even here. In fact, they're now (or maybe have been for some time) also shoving their crap through the channel as replies to legitimate threads outside of Off-Topic...whether that counts as "analysis" or "understanding" is debatable.

My point, since you seemed to miss it, is that restricting where we post has exactly zero effect on the behavior of the scum (human or automated) that spews this stuff.

[deraudrl]

And, ironically enough, this whole thread should have been in Off Topic from the onset anyway.
So it goes.

[trogluddite]

Why would someone releasing such a bot into the wild restrict it to the off-topic subforums of any particular site?

I can't say for sure why they do that; but long (oh, soooooo looooong!) experience of de-spamming the forum makes it clear that for some reason they do - we get vastly more spam in 'Off Topic' than on any of the other sub-forums (several hundred new threads in one night is not unusual!) I guess that it's assumed that spurious nonsense would seem less out of place there, so be less likely to get noticed. The vast majority of the spam seems to originate from just a tiny handful of bots (or bot-nets), so I would guess that this was a strategy decided upon by a single bot developer, who may well be long gone by now, leaving their progeny to carry on their dirty work unsupervised for all eternity.

Hence the recommendation for genuine members to avoid 'Off Topic', as this makes it much easier for me and Spogg to clear out the junk in bulk without accidentally removing any legitimate posts (the tools available to us are limited to lots of tiresome clicking on teeny-weeny buttons!) As you say, this doesn't change the bot's behaviour; it just reflects the behaviour that we see in practice.

[Spogg]

They mostly use a program called XRumer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer
http://www.botmasterlabs.net/

I believe the people spamming sell their services to webmasters in the name of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). True SEO is a highly skilled talent for making a website more visible to Google and the like. You get more clicks and so go up the ranking. But the spam idea is to get as many links onto the net as possible, thinking that Google will harvest the links into its database and increase the ranking accordingly.

But Google are wise to this and the Spammers don’t seem to realise it:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/lin ... es/299617/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin

Cheers

Spogg