[quote]imhungry wrote:
[quote]Chushin wrote:
[quote]imhungry wrote:
[quote]mbdix wrote:
[quote]challer1 wrote:
[quote]flipcollar wrote:
lol at the troll bot.
Can anyone explain to me what the purpose of such a troll would be? It doesn’t really seem to fit the mode of the usual troll. It’s not really fucking with anyone, and if there aren’t any follow up posts… I don’t see the point. Maybe a guy just looking for friends?[/quote]
This post / bot exists for a very specific purpose and it’s not for making friends. Instead, it wants to register a new account and get a few live posts on the target forum without getting the account banned. It repeats this on as many forums as possible.
Due to aidan’s status as robot, he is being forced to make posts on thousands of forums on various topics. Unfortunately, being unable to read, it is hard for aidan to make coherent posts. When you make a new account on a forums and start posting gibberish, you have a tendency to get banned.
As a solution, aidan seeks off-topic sections of forums (which tend to be less moderated) and then posts a generic “hi im new and interested in ________”, where the blank is whatever the bot decides the forum is about. For whatever reason it thought this site was about workouts and nutrition - guess he didn’t dig too deeply.
The bot then disappears, waiting for the right time to spring his sinister plan into action. In particular, he is waiting for his thread to fall off the first page so no one ever reads it again. This could be in just a few days or even some months later.
Whenever the time is right, the bot (or a person reading the bot’s original report), will return to target site, open up their old thread, and then edit their original post. In the edited post they will simply add a link to a website they are trying to promote via search engine optimization.
Based on the content of the replies… his plan was working perfectly.
Aiden is actually most likely powered by Xrumer, by far the most impressive (even intelligent?) automated posting bot ever created. By examining some of aidan’s handiwork, I was able to deduce who he was working for:
http://forums.syfy.com/index.php?showtopic=2361421&hl=
You can see in his post, about a month old, he has now edited in a link for a site promoting “oval swimming pools”. Aidan’s employer now ranks #18 in google for “oval swimming pools”, so it looks like his hard work is beginning to pay off.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that very few people even realize Aiden is a bot and many people will actually have a conversation with his advanced logic versions. In the link I posted above, it actually looks like a manual reply, but really Aiden’s logic was to find an excerpt from the most relevant article possible and copy and paste it into the message board. The bit from the link above was actually stolen directly from a third party game review:
In all likelihood, if you have 1000 posts or more on any forum, odds are you have replied to a bot’s meaningless question or post. You may have even argued with one if it snagged a bit of information that you did not happen to agree with. Think about the next time you go to write a long-winded response to someone with under 10 posts!
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Holy Shit! You ARE the internet![/quote]
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Great post IH![/quote]
The gif I tried posting didn’t show up, so I just said “fuck it”.
So there! 
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