Published on 12, July, 2020
Am I right to be concerned about the possibility of Chat Bots on this site?
There are a few concerning posts and, as I don't know much about these things, I'm not sure if I'm worrying over nothing here? Can they cause harm to individuals in any way on this type of chat site?
If I'm being ridiculous, someone please tell me so! (I will be more relieved than offended.)
People they are not a chatbot. A chatbot wouldn't amend their profile. They are also asking people to add friends and private message. A bot would usually not use complex commands on the site interface. Someone would need to code a site specific bot for this. A quite convoluted process.
Note that there is code specific to spam this forum software (Telligent Community), and we've seen it over the past week, and it defeats the anti-spam systems there are. There is code to imitate English responses by picking on key words (Alice is much better than Eliza, and Mitsuku better than Alice, plus they can get human input from elsewhere on the net). People could hack that code together. The aim could be a mass trawl to get personal information. The Copybot (qv) may have two purposes I can see; (a) create recognised and linked to 'sleeper' profiles that are then used for pharma spam etc; or (b) undermine the general anti-spam systems, by getting Akismet to trust particular IP addresses or patterns, and that could also be an application for a forum chatbot.
I share your reasoning and conclusion, but not quite your confidence.