Quantcast

I wanna know

binary visions

The voice of reason
Jun 13, 2002
22,092
1,132
NC
Hey @binary visions,

What exactly is going on with these copy/pasta posts? What is supposed to be getting accomplished by this? Serious question.
The recent trend for bots/spam accounts is to establish a positive reputation/posting history on the sites before starting in with whatever their purpose is. This is especially seen with the recent influx of Russian political bots in some of the biggest sites like Reddit (and we are getting an absolute boatload of Russian-sourced bots here lately).

Sometimes the people operating these bots are the ones who will use them for spam/etc., and sometimes they are creating accounts that they will sell later. There are places dedicated to selling forum accounts with good reputations or histories.

The problem with bot posts is, not only do you have to provide some kind of high quality content generation (which is pretty tricky by itself), it also has to be topical and relevant to site, otherwise they get ID'd quickly. Copying an ancient post from the archives in the same forum is actually a pretty clever way of doing that: it's got a very high chance of being good human content, topical, and old enough that nobody will remember it.
 

Westy

the teste
Nov 22, 2002
54,232
20,012
Sleazattle
The recent trend for bots/spam accounts is to establish a positive reputation/posting history on the sites before starting in with whatever their purpose is. This is especially seen with the recent influx of Russian political bots in some of the biggest sites like Reddit (and we are getting an absolute boatload of Russian-sourced bots here lately).

Sometimes the people operating these bots are the ones who will use them for spam/etc., and sometimes they are creating accounts that they will sell later. There are places dedicated to selling forum accounts with good reputations or histories.

The problem with bot posts is, not only do you have to provide some kind of high quality content generation (which is pretty tricky by itself), it also has to be topical and relevant to site, otherwise they get ID'd quickly. Copying an ancient post from the archives in the same forum is actually a pretty clever way of doing that: it's got a very high chance of being good human content, topical, and old enough that nobody will remember it.

So what you are saying is that my account might be worth something?
 

binary visions

The voice of reason
Jun 13, 2002
22,092
1,132
NC
What is the history behind those russian emoji?
There was a lot of bitching (mostly good-natured) a very long time ago about our lack of emoji selection, at the time it was the stock vBulletin emojis and there were like 8 of them. I can't remember if it was the original RM owner Aaron, or IAB, or me, but someone found a big, weird emoji pack and loaded the whole thing in... which included all these strange Russian emojis.

It definitely is not a way to signal to our comrades that the country is ready for conquest. :close: