All these guests, etc.

[DrampardonMe]

Apologies if it's an obvious question, but it's been bothering me for a while: are there really 200 or so people browsing these forums without an account, or is it mostly bots or such? Browsing through some topics and it seems like (a few years ago or so, at least) there were even spam posts by (I have to assume) bot accounts, as well. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the latter ever happened during the height of this site.

I know this forum is... markedly less active than in the past, so I'm asking out of concern more than anything. I'm also not the most technically-literate person in the world, so I'm not sure if "bot" is the right term here.

[Del]

I'm pretty sure it's been said before that the majority of those "guests" are actually Google Spiders (I think that's the term?) that basically go around scraping websites for information to populate the search results? It's nothing particularly menacing or worth worrying about.

and yeah, we occasionally have spam bots sneak through the registration filter but it's usually not the worst, they get removed relatively quickly. It never really happened back during the sites peak because spambots just weren't as commonplace/advanced as they are now, I presume. compare 2012 Twitter to 2024 Twitter, for example.

[DrampardonMe]

^Ah, I thought "spiders" was the term. Thanks for clarifying, though!

It never really happened back during the sites peak because spambots just weren't as commonplace/advanced as they are now, I presume. compare 2012 Twitter to 2024 Twitter, for example.

That's a good point, too. I'd like to think spambots are still quite obvious to most people, but man, who knows what it'll be like in 2036...

[Joeno]

They are called spiders, yeah, although they're not just Google's - I believe a lot of them are LLM related (AI like ChatGPT). There's no harm there.

Despite appearances, the spam isn't worse than before, although it's more visible now obviously. We had a short period where they broke through some of our anti-spam measures, but I've changed some things around to stop them.

[DrampardonMe]

^Good to hear it's fixable! Does it ever get more difficult to manage, or does it boil down to "code is code"? (Again, tech-illiterate here) Appreciate the work being done, at any rate.