Bots

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Bots, or more aptly; spambots, are users that are auto-generated and controlled by a computer program to somehow benefit another, this typically involves advertising and spamming.

Bots are almost universally disliked

History

The origin of forum spambots is largely unknown, largely because they only began to gain infamy in 2006 when ✕Rumer was introduced. This new program was able to bypass security mechanisms designed to prevent forum spam like no program before it; this made automated forum spam much more practical for spammers. Similar programs followed suit.

The first occurrence of a bot on MCCP was undocumented and remains unknown. Throughout the forum history many bots have come and gone, few ever causing a disturbance of any real note. Most are permabanned or deleted within, at most, a few hours.

Influence on forum culture

Bots are often teased and lampooned by forumers, whenever a bot posts a spam thread you can expect to see forumers follow up with a sarcastic remarks about the bot's writing and/or offered wares.

DO NOT PICK THIS YOU WILL BE AUTOBANNED

To help weed out bots Dracophile added a new false gender choice sometime in 2009,"Ad Bot (DO NOT PICK THIS YOU WILL BE AUTOBANNED)", as the first option when selecting a gender. Since most bots choose the first gender option given, this helped distinguish them from regular users. Choosing this option does not actually result in a ban, and some users have started to use it.

Bot Taxonomy

An "Esperanto Advocate" in the wild

Bots are typically typified by bad grammar, spelling, and sentence composition, they also tend to have a fake ICQ number . Though outside of this they tend to be classifiable into certain groups:

• "Esperanto Advocate": These bots are known for their non-sensical, gibberish paragraphs composed almost entirely of diacritic letters. They often also have gibberish names and avatars depicting something meant to be frightful.

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