General Questions about Spam Accounts

[H00V3RD8M]

Occasionally, I find some users banned because they were spammers. Are these spam accounts usually automated, or are they ran by people that break the rules?

[iXenite]

I'm obviously not a staff member so I cannot speak with any authority on the subject, but from what I have observed of spam accounts , they are all automated. The same applies to commenters on popular websites that inform you of their brother making a lot of money from home. Bots trowel the internet and post random things to gain clicks. I imagine it must be effective to a degree or the practice would have died out.

[ddavies10693]

Spamming can be either a bot doing it automatically, or just an annoying person who comments repeatedly, or incessantly bothers someone (and usually it's mod authors being bothered unfortunately).

[H00V3RD8M]

From what I've seen, the spam accounts' usernames look like they were created by a real person, not randomly generated. For a spambot, I'm pretty sure that somebody created the account manually and then programmed a script, the "bot" to publish spam on the forums via the account. They are usually instantly banned by the staff.

 

I don't think that the staff gives these accounts formal warnings because the bot creators could program them to register a new account to circumvent restrictions placed on the previous account.

 

The spambots are basically scripts programmed by a person to crawl websites to harvest information and then post it on randoms forums to gain attention. The bots usually hit popular websites, where their posts can attract more attention. Eventually a user reports it to the staff, they ban the bot, then repeat the process for the next spammer that posts on the forums.

Edited June 6, 2016 by H00V3RD8M