Has anyone else noticed the new members who aren't what they seem? I think there has been three of them recently. They all used first and last names as user id. One was William somebody, one was from Denver. Chatty first posts, composed by humans. They seemed legit, but a couple of them posted unnecessary comments to a few older threads. That was suspicious, but the introductory posts seemed fine. Especially William's. Well, here this morning, gone this afternoon. Along with Paul's innocent welcomes. How's a body to know?
The pattern seems to be a human first post, followed by bot posts. Don't know what they get out of it.
Yes, I've noticed. It wouldn't surprise me if they are all bot generated. They seem pretty formulaic to me.
We're witnessing the end of the web. The bots are becoming impossible to filter out.
Maybe if site sign up required sending $1 to Floyd via US Mail, they could be kept out. Anything electronic is likely to fail.
I'm not optimistic about our future. Enjoy while you can.
Welcome to the Web - where what seems to be nothing can be real - and what seems to be real can be nothing. Pick one (and anything between) - and move on. Enjoy!
... and then there are the real users who act like bots!! Take Davey1 for example. ALL of his posts are cryptic one- or two-liners. Never really answers the question. Always ends on an upbeat note. Very suspect!
(...just havin' a little fun with this...)
ššš
So true. Enjoy!
Yes we are aware. Please help us out with flagging when a post is serving links or ads. Beyond that I can assure you that the spammers have been around for years I think there hasn't been a morning in memory where Floyd didn't have to go comb through the spammers that popped up overnight - these folks get deleted but there are a lot of them. This has been part of the morning routine for many years.
I deleted a half dozen such accounts yesterday.
The giveaway is that, more often than not, their second or third post has a link to whatever it is they are getting paid to promote. At that point, I zap them.
How is one to know? I think that is the whole point: you aren't.
But the spam/fake account issue has been a problem since the birth of this site. AI written text makes it more difficult to detect, but eventually they give themselves away.
If you see one, flag the suspect post/comment and I will look into it as soon as I can.
Many of my older posts pop up with a new comment. More times than not the comment is suspicious.
I've been seeing that too and considering as part of this migration to the new version of the site software closing comments on posts that are more than 5 years old or something like that.
I've reported a lot of obvious scammers, but these recent "members" are something else. They are difficult to spot, until they go on to post more. Even so, the subsequent posts I read, one from William, didn't post links as far as I recall, just made botish comments of no relevance. I actually remember one of William's posts (it struck me as odd, also, that a newby looking for advice would be so quick to answer others' questions). He said something to the effect: Congratulations on opening your bagel shop. A rounder might work better if the dough has been removed from the fridge and allowed to warm.
You do good work, Floyd, thank you.
Yeah, I saw that.
AI makes it much easier to generate a plausible, seemingly informed reply to a question. Spammers are doing this to establish the credibility of their accounts before they start sneaking links into their replies.
I don't see many posts with suspect links in, probably because Floyd and Dorota have already zapped them.
What I do see as typical Bot behaviour is:
Lance