Blog This Site Needs Stat Bots

these are bots that sit online all the time pretending to be members. they would have non-bot names, of course, unlike their bot brethren who come here and give themselves away with names with suspicious characters and numbers in them, as if a drug name and dosage would be mistaken for a real person. so these stat bots will appear normal on the Members Online Now list. i figure we could have anywhere from 800 to 3000 of them online at once to give this place the look of a really active site.

if programmed correctly, the stat bots could even create threads. blogs would be out, of course, since they have to be 100 words of real-looking text, but a well-engineered bot could insert links to news material from good sources and so forth as OPs every now and again under Chit Chat.

the one thing they couldn't do is post. i imagine they'd spend most of their time checking out archived threads and profiles. no worries there, though. we've got plenty of experienced lurkers here to tell us what types of things these bots should be clicking on throughout the day (and night) to keep down suspicion.

then again, they could do some posting, too. if they were instructed to put up random excerpts of text snatched off the web, they could post to Confessions the same as the regs using that thread now.

Bots are cute!

DROIIIIID

I think it'd be cool if there at least a few bots floating around. Not 1300 of them but like 3 or 4 and if we didn't know they were bots.

To play Devil's Advocate, if you were to create some bots and put them online and said they were there to stress test the site or some other testing purpose, who could prove you activated them to simulate volume for marketing reasons?

I like big bots.

How do we even know some of the lurkers on the site aren't bots now?

The "others" could be too. I've always wondered about some of the people who log in but never post. They could be a newer special bot designed to avoid detection.

I mean, sometimes it's impossible to tell when he's kidding 'cuz of the way he carries himself, but clearly he's not serious about this bot thing. He can correct me if I'm wrong, but sometimes when you read what he says, you can see one clear sign he's winking at you and kidding. Other times he says things in a silly way but is deadly serious, like the Road Trip stuff. But in this bot thing, when he said 1300 of them, that's pretty much proof to me he's joking, 'cuz that would look totally nuts to have 1300 bots sitting on the Members Online Now list.

Usually, though, when he says silly stuff as a joke, he leaves enough room for him to pretend he's serious, so that's why I'm playing Devil's Advocate, to see how far this nutty idea can be taken seriously. I'm pretty sure you're allowed to test your site with volume trials, so if you gave bots different testing objectives and kept track of the results, it would be pretty hard for an auditor to say you're using a marketing trick. Just sayin'.

The devil will find work for idle hands to do

Duhh, that's where bots came from, Blowman.

Please stand for the lurking glass nation anthem, writen an composed by the one and only Kahlua...">

If I'm gonna be officially honored, I'd prefer to be called Shanni.

indeed i was kidding about this, nathan. i'd rather you not get hit with 1300 counts of fraud.

I figured you were kidding