this is a serious problem
 

look at your threads as you post, more and more it will be full of 'guest' watchers at all hours of the day more so when there are few users on and we are getting nightly spam bots, there is something seriously messed up here, coda please do something!

Just don't worry bout it bro.

hell no! i actually /like/ this site all these suspicios bots and an shit are /not/ ok, i put a lot of time effort and money into this sit i don't want it to become some awful crysandrea or gaia, this needs to be worked on now while there is a hance of saving it

Yeah, honestly, don't know how many times I've said it already, but I'm starting to get worried, too. And for a person who's usually chill about stuff...

it's kinda scary when you are alone and there are five or eleven of them floating in the thread with you but if the thread is full then nothing

they post around 3-4 in the morning^^:

except me^^: this place is friggin haunted with creepers

Nah, it's scary when you SEE a bot in the "Newest Member" section, and they haven't posted yet... It's like waiting for a time bomb and you can't see the time.

yeah that is pretty messed up two, it's happened twice

If you see someone you 'know' is a bot in the newest members list and hasn't been taken care of yet just send me or another mod a PM. :3 they normally get taken care of by the time i get on but sometimes i catch them :x

i told coda the last time i saw one and he said leave it be because there is no /proof/

Every once in a while a bot's profile won't look suspicious. Since some people like having weird usernames, we prefer to ask questions first and shoot later.

The guests in threads at odd hours of the night are mostly search engines. We WANT those. Don't sweat them.

Spam posts rarely last more than a few hours here. We run a tight ship.

no it's guests in /empty/ threads that is scary

Yeah, but the spambots usually have the same info on their profile.

Still mostly search engines. I would mostly imagine spambots don't generally browse threads before registering (it would just be a waste of processing power) and if they did they would probably target active ones. We WANT search engines to feel free to read our posts because it makes Trisphee more important in search results.

And really there's not much I could do anyway. If I told bots to go away, only the bad bots would be here (because the good ones would obey the rules). All I could do would be to take the guest count display off of threads, and that wouldn't actually change anything.

XD thus far in my trisphee life I have reported two bots and that is about it. I am not sure how to tell a bot from a user until it post because Coda is right people have strange user names. You can't start a witch hunt ever time theres a new user. What do the bots do besides spam?

Mmhmm, product links and broken foreign languages are big clues (if a REAL Russian user registered here and put Russian in their signature it would be readable, not garbage). I also check e-mail addresses and IP addresses, which can SOMETIMES be pretty obvious.

Yeah, those are easy to catch, we nab them whenever we see them.