(silly) questions about spam and stuff.

[one out of none]

Sorry, I just have some kinda silly questions about technical things. I hope no one minds!

Down the end of the page where it lists all the people who are online, it said Google Feedfetcher. I was just wondering what that is? I googled it but I didn't really understand it any clearer.

Also, (and this is a really stupid one ) but when spam is posted, I've seen people calling the people who did it bots. Does that mean that it's not an actual person, who registers and all that before posting the spam?

I don't have a clue about all this, sorry!

Thanks to anyone who replies.

[Proximity]

There are other people here who can explain the google thing better ... but as far as I understand, though google doesn't index BUS (like you can't find BUS posts or users through google search results) google does send little ... umm things ... over that look at BUS and make sure that it shows up in search results if you're looking for something like "self harm web board" or "bodies under siege" etc.

As for the spammers, that I do understand a bit better
Yes, they are 'bots' - they're just like programs that someone has written, they're not real people making accounts and logging onto the board and posting spam. Some of the ways we recognize and thwart spam accounts before they post on the board are because they do things that only bots can do - like somehow having details filled out in their account before they've activated the account and logged into it

We don't mind people asking about how things work at all! I've learned a lot about how the internet works and what spam is and what an IP address is and all sorts of stuff through being on BUS, and I did it by asking questions, too

prox.
[only half mute]

[kiwi33]

"Net bots" or "bots" for short are software applications that run automated tasks over the Net. As Prox says, a lot of the spam is generated by bots.

Google also uses bots, which scan the Net and feed information back to the Google databases which is then used when you do a search.

The Google Feedfetcher is a bot which searches for RSS or Atom feeds (which are something generated by some websites, such as blogs), and uses them for Google's blog search at http://blogsearch.google.com/ .

Google[Bot] is another one that you may see from time-to-time. From Wiki; "Googlebot is the search bot software used by Google, which collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine".

It does *not* retrieve specific information (member's user-names, the details of posts, etc) which is obviously an important security/safety issue. For example, when I Google "one out of none" (try it ), nothing relevant to you is retrieved.

[Proximity]

I was hoping you'd come along and explain this you definitely 'get it' on a level above my understanding!

prox.
[only half mute]

[one out of none]

Thank you both for those replies, they're really helpful!

I'm kind of glad (in a way) that I'm not too well informed about the workings of the internet, because the idea of spammers who aren't actually people and automated programs seems kind of strange to me. But at the same time it's still really interesting, and I should probably know more about it all than I do.

It's good to know that you have ways of spotting it though, and that bus isn't as "searchable" as I thought it was. That's really reassurring, thank you both for explaining it so well!