What is a Bot?

[Scooterman]

And how and why Do they join forums and why do they post post?

[Burgerman]

A bot is a bit of PC software that joins maybe 100,000 forums at a time across a week, with various user names, passwords, emails etc all from throwaway IPs and hacked ISPs, etc Why? They are all after link juice. They have a site that makes money. Or a page with ads. And no traffic. How do they get traffic? They get it from google ultimately. But google only links to them, and ranks their page highly, if its sees many other pages also linking to it. So they spam forums, and any other place they can get a link posted that points to their target. Usually sneakers, viagra, cialis, kitchens, or mobility sites, etc.

The link can be in their profile. Or on a page. Or in their sig. Google indexes it within seconds. You will notice that google waits on this forum ready to index any new post made in seconds. So now you know!

I delete and then ban about 2 to 10 daily, often the moment they register. By IP address, email, user name, etc. They can be manual (human) doing it small scale, or automated by the thousands. You can buy the software that automatically submits computer generated posts to huge lists of forums in minutes on a schedule. And yes these bots can answer the anti spam questions, and the visual images, and make up semi intelligent posts.

When I look at the IP adress they join with, its almost always india, pakistan, russia, or the australia (oceana) or singapore, or similar. So common and easy to spot. Deleted in seconds.

Some however are manual. For eg theres a new one called TheREALscooterman, that isnt you, with a US IP address. Joined a while ago, never posted anything. memberlist.php?start=3360 After doing a little reverse IP and email checking it seems he owns a scooter store online. Is he a spammer? Remains to be seen. These are harder to know. He may be a normal member, but why no posts? And he may appear to be a normal member and in future start dropping spam links to his site to gain traffic/sales... Then he will be warned, and if ignored, deleted.

[Scooterman]

Understood, thank you for taking the time to answer