AI bots

I am a member of a fish keeping forum and over the past couple of months we are seeing very odd posts, some with links directing us to something totally unrelated.

We are told that they are "bots", and, although just quirky at first, something you just have a bit of a giggle at, they are now becoming rather annoying.

The admin on our forum are not particularly visible. We just have a few mods whose duties are only basic, such as monitoring content.

Any significant "changes" to the structuring of the forum are done at an admin level....so we're stuck with these annoying bots!

My question is....are there basic software packages available to forums to prevent these bots from infiltrating them? I don't believe we have bots on here, is that because admin have indeed installed such software on this forum?

I'm not sure how it all works.

 

Thanks for tagging them in your post, I hope they can shed more light on this.

 

It's getting pretty bad on the likes of Twitter and reddit now. There's always been bots of course, I was an admin on a couple of forums in the past and there was always waves of bots joining and typically pushing certain political agendas, eg during brexit. But I thinks it's going to be on a whole new level with all the added AI ones

 

Wondered which forum you are referring to ?
We follow two of the most popular uk ones, Ultimate Reefs and UK Aquatic Plants , and cannot say we have noticed any such troublesome bots/posts ?

Usually in any well run forum, if you let the admin know, if they have not already seen such posts, they will quickly remove them and lock out the culprits.

As thats not happening on your forum think we would find a new forum to follow, too easy to be lured into clicking on such links that you have no idea where they may lead if your browser / PC does not have good defences to stop you doing that.

 

The forum I am a member of is Monsterfishkeepers. It's been going since 2005, I joined in 2015.

 

Not a site we had seen before - its one very big and worldwide forum so expect it will be a magnet for attracting all the bots and scammers.
Think you will just have to go carefully if your site owners/ admins cannot keep on top of things.

As such sites are basically free to use, the owners will only have a limited amount of money they can spend on such defenses vs the many private and state sponsored techno folk who delight in causing such trouble, they way of todays online world.

 

It is a big site, possibly one of the biggest out there regarding the fish keeping hobby. Admin haven't been present for a while due to a whole host of reasons. And mods simply don't have the knowledge/authority to do anything at the moment. It's getting quite bad now though. Mere members such as myself are quite vocal about this influx of bots so hopefully it triggers change.