The new LJ bot army

[alicebentley]

My last post drew interestingly non-specific replies from two new LJ users: fulviaituv and fotinasusid.

I've given them 12 hours to prove their humanity, and then plan to delete their comments. What I can't puzzle out - and what prompts my asking people now - is what the bots hope to achieve? I don't see any hidden links that would add Google juice, which used to be the goal.

(I originally wrote this as a reply to someone else's journal, when she got a similarly vague reply from portiearo, and then decided I wanted to post about it here.)

Comments

[fmsv.livejournal.com]

This confused me for a while, trying to figure out what the difference between "fulviaituv" and "fulviaituv" was. I finally figured it out after looking at your previous post.

[alicebentley]

Ooo, thanks, I'll go fix that.

[ckd]

My guess is that they're testing for unmonitored or barely monitored pages; the follow-on bots will search for those non-specific replies and know what pages to hit.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

That, and also possibly trying to build up a non-spam base so early spam activities will be seen as "from an established poster".

Or, maybe they're just really dumb; a possibility not to be overlooked!

[billroper]

It's a bot. It's part of some spamming effort, although it's hard to say what they'll gain from this particular trick.

[rathanylakan.livejournal.com]

Bots that aren't posting links to Viagara companies in Russia or stuff like that are advance agents. They go "Hrmm... can we post here? Will this work, will the message remain?" Then the usernames and messages are googled for and the bots that post sales spam find all the successful advance spam and know where to post.

Forums I've modded have gotten messages like this right before the flood of pharmaceutical posts started.

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

You're being very nice to the bots. The first one got deleted, marked as spam, and banned from my journal. The second one also got banned from the thread.

[dave-ifversen.livejournal.com]

I, too, got a reply from fotinasusid on one of my entries (nobody else saw it because it was screened). Deleted, kill-filed, and banned forever.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I have yet to receive a single spam comment. I don't know if that's because I'm set to screen everything or what.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

I have a very old post with the word "sexuality" in it which seems to get about one silly, irrelevant spam a month. It didn't start until the post was already very stale, and the rate hasn't increased.