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[Ultimuh]

That spambot over in life advice. I don't think we've ever had anything like that. Fortunately it's limited to one section.

I knew someone here would post about it.

[TD1]

Same.
Quite the annoyance.

It's even got the bit below its name as "Mr. Watcher" or some such.

[scriver]

Is...is that bait? I feel like that's bait.

I must admit it looks somewhat baity. Not intentional. In my defense, I was very drunk when I posted that.

I don't think it's bait. I think it was you taking the bait of the previous post, which was pure bait.

[bloop_bleep]

That spambot over in life advice. I don't think we've ever had anything like that. Fortunately it's limited to one section.

I knew someone here would post about it.

Damn, just noticed it. I suppose someone messaged Toady already?

[NullForceOmega]

I don't know how many others did but I reported it.

[Teneb]

I decided to take a look at Life Advice to see what everyone was talking about, and it is, at default settings, 56 and a half pages of spam threads.

[Rolan7]

Maybe they desperately want help with their casino gambling problem, meanies. 

[milo christiansen]

At last count it ended/started on page 71, for 1417 threads.

[Yoink]

Man, we gon' be 504'ing for days.

[Comrade P.]

That is one massive spam attack. Doesn't spam usually get posted across boards in an attack like this? I wonder why is it limited to a specific section of lower boards.

[Draignean]

I believe the current theory is search tag proliferation, which makes sense considering the 'content' of the posts. Since the bot is already posting at the max rate, there's no real reason to go elsewhere.

In a fascinating twist, the spambot isn't trying to get to the maximum number of people, but rather attract maximum attention from a search spider.

Spam, meant for machines.

[TheDarkStar]

Why don't people create their own website to host spam on? That way they don't have to worry about it suddenly getting deleted.

[hector13]

It's free this way, other than the effort required to create the bot.

[Arx]

Also, such websites exist. Many domains they no one ever visits on purpose have stuff like this and shady links and whatever on them.

[Rolan7]

Google pays a lot more attention to content on popular websites.  I assume it weights down forums, in general, but still probably a lot better than a site which has no legitimate traffic.

There's an interesting type of attack where bad actors will hack into a website and, instead of injecting exploit kit redirects, will simply add a bunch of invisible metadata similar to this casino stuff.  It's completely benign for visitors to the site, and *relatively* benign for the owner...  Though Google tends to find out, and tank their ranking as they're untrustworthy.

Because these lay undetected for so long, they're a lot more effective than say...  Overwriting the home page with a bunch of obvious casino ads.  They're only targeting the search engine spiders, not visitors.  Of course, it's also a clear indicator that the site is insecure, and will be hacked more dangerously sooner or later.