Has anyone noticed these annoying spambots?

That just repost content from sites like Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers on forums and seem to put links to various scammy sites in their home page/signature fields? I swear I've noticed a few like that recently (generally not on AdminAddict, but I recall places like Sitepoint had a quite of few these kinds of members).

Is there really some sort of recent development where they just paste randomly found in Google text in response to whatever a topic is? Like for example, in this topic, one might just paste the entire spambot article from Wikipedia.

 

yes, ive noticed these, the spambots seem to be getting cleverer,but how can it be done? are they real people or bots

 

Can you post a link to an example? I'm having a hard time understanding.

 

Thread moved to Member and Staff Management.

 

You'd be surprised what kind of software is out there to do all this. I never did anything like this, but I knew a few people who had software, I even had some of it. But all they had to do was input a few forum urls and a list of user/passwords to try and register and just let it go. YOu could tell it what to post, where to find things to post, etc. Pretty neat if you ask me LOL. Now if only you could put it to use for something good and not spammy.

 

I was being overrun with spammers/spambots at my site. As soon as I started using the vBStop Forum Spam mod, I didn't get a single spammer.
A couple of days ago I turned it off some reason that I forget about now, but within 5 mins I had 3 spammers post.

I turned it back on immediately.

 

A simple general knowledge question has made spam bot registrations a rare occurrence at my forum. That said, I can remember two recent occasions when a spam bot got through and posted a vaguely relevant post with at least one link. I searched the user names of those spam bots and found out that their posts are copy/paste jobs.

I've been interested in that modification Miss Peggy mentioned above, but for now I'm just keeping an eye on its development.

 

As you know, we have that installed here too - but we just had a sneaky spammer a little while ago. His posts were 95% relevant, but he had spam links in his signature.

They are getting smarter.

 

yes they are. I know the peace won't last for long.

 

only 95% relevant? lol

nice catch

 

I believe I saw that. Think there were 2 posts made one night? Sounded almost plausible but slightly askew from what I recall.



In any event standard spamming I understand completely. Is post #1 of this thread discussing regular spam or is it some type of RSS thing being discussed?

Or copy and pasting one forums posts onto another?

 

It's specifically about spambots and spammers who just copy and paste posts to get their spammy signature links shown more. I might think it could be a human member to be honest, maybe it's someone who doesn't known English just stealing stuff that sounds remotely relevant from the first result for the topic in Google, or just a spambot with RSS capabilities or that's programmed to pull content from Yahoo Answers.