These weird threads pop up on occasion and I've always wondered why?

I get they are spam of some sort, but what are they referring to? I can't read the text so I can't garner any information from looking at them.

But even as spam, what do the spammers think they will accomplish flooding a message board such as a video game message board with these?

Also, the internet might be the worst invention ever.

EVER.

Someone before said that these bots post nothing but jumbled garbage. Don’t know if it’s true or not, and if so what the point is.

Spam bot automation is real University of California :D.

All hail are new glorious leader Chinese spam bot. I wonder if there testing there tech on the GB Forums or just trying to make money with referral url's.

Regular advertising doesn't work on me, so i really have no idea what forum, comment section and e-mail spam is supposed to do.
There's only one advert which got a sale from me, was watching darts on tv and saw a german chocolate bar which looked delicious (and it was).

I'm guessing it's attempted ddos attacks, not advertising. Especially considering how long it's been going now. It just looks like a botnet that has been setup to keep trying and then it's been left going. No one would actually keep paying for spam ads like that for this long.

I thought it might be some kind of SEO? Like, getting mentioned in the same post as "University of Oregon" on a popular website might be valuable somehow?

Google is usually smart enough to distinguish between honest content and stuff like that. In fact, depending on the source this stuff can actually be toxic to your SEO.

@cikame said:

Regular advertising doesn't work on me, so i really have no idea what forum, comment section and e-mail spam is supposed to do.

There's only one advert which got a sale from me, was watching darts on tv and saw a german chocolate bar which looked delicious (and it was).

That bar is pretty new, it's good though :)

The literal translation is saying that they offer "certificates" for those particular universities. I quote certificates because it means diploma, degree etc.

Real talk though, GB really need to get on it with stopping these spam threads. I see them everyday, it's been happening for months, and wonder why do I bother coming here every time I see these.

Yeah, I think it's DDoS attacks, and experimenting on how they can keep getting through to here. The enemy fears Giant Bomb because Giant Bomb is the ultimate weapon.

It's almost certainly a method of gaming their SEO. Basically getting their keywords mentioned on high traffic, high Google rank websites can help to boost visibility because big data is ridiculous.

The motivation of attacks like these are typically SEO related. It's unlikely they're getting any actual benefit, but the related labor and processing power necessary to do it is likely cheap enough that they don't care.

Spammers only care about getting their garbage out there in massive quantities. If only 0.01% of their attacks are actually effective, that's totally fine with them.

On a funny side note, there are about half a dozen deleted spambot posts in this thread alone.

I'm sure if it was as easy as just "getting on it" it would have been done by now. Something tells me it's a really hard problem to fix but then again I have no idea how that stuff works.

My favorite part of the spambots is when they try to mimic human speech in random thread comments. Then once they are able to make threads, they lose their shit and immediately make 100 spam threads at once.

It's SEO. They are trying to get their site associated with certain searches.

I think the strangest part about these posts are the way the "bots" posts. That they will often bring back old posts but there will be no spam. Just a sentence that just barely references the subject. I guess the bot makes a dozen or so fake posts before spamming to get past some spam filtering GB's backend has setup.

*tip*