I have observed the same pattern on my forum.
Like yours it is a related to a specific sport only much bigger and in French. It has been running for over 20 years now, the traffic is generates is much lower than it used to be. Despite having 22k registered users, today it only counts now a handful of active participants and I can keep a close eye on the activity and registration are manually handled too.
Bots used to be easy to spot (even at registration) but not any more... it is becoming trickier to detect them or even know why they are there.
User name totally blend in the rest of the users.
Answers are well written and in French.
Payload/real purpose on the forum is not immediately obvious.
It reaches a point where despite my experience it is hard to tell for sure if it is a legitimate human or a bot... (I cannot rule out human spammers as well but the pattern is a bit too regular and I feel that would be too much time investment for not much immediate return).
I'm a bit puzzled by the real purpose of this... beyond some delayed SEO or some service promotion, did we reach a stage where we can face on our forum the same kind of automated/industrialized political influence spam as on popular social networks?
T.
Like yours it is a related to a specific sport only much bigger and in French. It has been running for over 20 years now, the traffic is generates is much lower than it used to be. Despite having 22k registered users, today it only counts now a handful of active participants and I can keep a close eye on the activity and registration are manually handled too.
Bots used to be easy to spot (even at registration) but not any more... it is becoming trickier to detect them or even know why they are there.
User name totally blend in the rest of the users.
Answers are well written and in French.
Payload/real purpose on the forum is not immediately obvious.
It reaches a point where despite my experience it is hard to tell for sure if it is a legitimate human or a bot... (I cannot rule out human spammers as well but the pattern is a bit too regular and I feel that would be too much time investment for not much immediate return).
I'm a bit puzzled by the real purpose of this... beyond some delayed SEO or some service promotion, did we reach a stage where we can face on our forum the same kind of automated/industrialized political influence spam as on popular social networks?
T.
Statistics: Posted by tsourbier — Thu Jan 23, 2025 7:37 am