MeowCanuck: I think you're due for phishing and spam training. How is it possible that a non-IT guy like me can spot it a mile away, but you can't?
rtcvb32: Spam training... somehow i'm reminded of AIM when i had it, i'd get random message from 'girls' who wanted to be my friend and would refer me to a pay site while they were in the shower... yeah a lot of those.
I'd found the easiest way to detect a bot was to throw out something and see if they replied with 'huh?' or not. Course one bot if you had 'bot' in the text anywhere it would reply with 'no i'm not a bot' in a fixed text, so i asked 'so do you like ro-bots?' and it threw the same message at me, obvious matching...
In a chat you could ask it's age over and over again and it may give different answers, ranging from 7 to a billion years old. I might comment about how i got both my arms removed and i'm typing with my nose, and see how they react... Though a number of bots would apparently compile replies and might incorporate those replies to make it seem more human, except for obvious differences in style and things that make it obvious it's not the same person.
Hmmmm... it's not often what they do/say, but what they don't do that's more interesting.
I had a really good one. It totally threw me off guard. It had automated messages, so it was definitely a bot, but when it asked me my age, i said 12, and it appologized and that type of bot ('cause you can id a certain patttern to certain bots) stopped messaging me. At that point, i wanted to know what the company was to actually thank them, because it was the only company with bots that weren't ultimately sending porn to children.
kohlrak: Asking your doctor about a lump is not the same as going in and removing it without a test, like your witch hunt.
MeowCanuck: Call it whatever you like. At my previous company, IT sent out spam and phishing bait. If you struck out three times, you were fired regardless of role and performance. Being unable to recognize this stuff is an extreme danger to you and others around you.
Now I know why so many legitimate customer complaints go unanswered by some IT companies. I expect that policy to change with more and more "AI." If not, it'll sink.
Do the forums have the same consequences? Absolutely not. But I care deeply about the integrity about keeping non-consensual or irrelevant ads out of here.
And i care about witch hunts. The type of spam we're seeing here isn't even convincing. Hell, i decided to cehck out the scam of the site to see how dangerous it actually was. The spam link, while obvious spam, was for faking the amount of friends you have. Wasn't even related to the iphone messages, here. Anyone who follows that line to the point of giving them what they're after needs help. To even turn that into a usable URL, you need to know at least a little (like how address bars work, how spaces aren't valid in URLs), and if you know that much, you probably aren't the type to not know better that the ad and the website aren't even in agreement. Sure, the ad spam can be annoying, but it's a single post and when the mods get here in a few hours they'll take care of it. Now, and i know it's agains the rules to question mod acctions, but i like giving suggestions even if they're against the rules: if someone were to actually post a high quality answer, i'd delete the spam reply, not the original message, because then anyone who honestly had the issue could use that response.
Those ones are actually kinda sneaky, because the first one has a link, and the second has number. Second one, once again, not so much 'cause you have to know at least something to even be able to fall for it (or can that also double for a real phone number?). The first, however, has a clickable link, which can actually be dangerous. Fortunately, someone who is in reasonable distance from Jacksonville, Florida who could even use their services, also likely wouldn't be convinced to do things based on the first really bad ad they clicked.
This does beg to ask the question, though: given the downrate spam and all that: why are people allowed to post without making 10USD in purchases, first, just like with gift code purchases?
