Hello

[Guest]

He may be a real human being, paid to do this job.

“Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms.”
-Ron Paul

[PaulW]

If you google "I know that forums are a good place to learn and interact with other people" (with quotes)
then there are over 23,000 hits. That seems like too much for it to be real people, but then there is a lot of variation.
I suspect it's a bot that makes the initial post (and maybe one or two follow-ups) and if it survives then some real people take over.

Thanks for trying to ruin internet forums, spammers!

[dmbwest]

Homer Simpson voice .... UUUUUU Spambots !!

Is it just me or does anyone else wish they had more exotic, names ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTv9AhCuSU4

aloha,
pog

[kalakoa]

This is just another thing that should be handled in software, as in "filter out posts where (user < 100 posts *and* non-US IP)".

Otherwise, a really onerous registration process.

Things like CAPTCHA don't work as well as they should: spam is a huge industry, so you can hire decoders for that too.

Long-term it all hardly matters unless the old institutions collapse before they finish ruining the internets -- after it's all sanitized and locked down for eternal copyright, forums like this will only exist in a semi-underground store-and-forward network like the Fidonet (or UUCP) of olden times.

Some would find the above a bit trollish, but at least it's not spam.

[punafish]

So it's a trollbot?