The Curious State of Agarioforums

[QueenHeather]

(05-05-2022, 05:24 AM)bijoy Wrote: Hello everyone, it's Ry again. My second post on the forums ever. I thought i was never even going to post although I saw something very interesting around here and thought, maybe the moderators would like to know. 

I was looking at the home page and at the bottom, within "Users Active in Last 24 Hours" first thing that stood out to me was how many spammy, 6-letter names were in the list. Sure enough, many of those profiles shared 3 things in common. All of these users had ages randomly selected within 30s and 40s, all of them registered in the last 24 hours, and all have a total time online of 10 to 15 seconds. It is more than obvious that these are bots, although the question might be, why?

Another thing appears to be that some bots stay on the site doing virtually nothing for months. Here is the one banned profile within the "Users Active Now" list, also at the bottom of the home page.

SharaPoinc (Banned)
Total Posts: 0 (0 posts per day | 0 percent of total posts)

Time Spent Online: 3 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, 19 Hours, 9 Minutes, 36 Seconds

I have to say, this bot was very lowkey to get by for almost 4 months without being banned. It appears that all it did was lurk around the forums, and then just today it did something that set off an algorithm which either automatically banned it, or got the attention of staff. Is this a common thing to find around the chat, bots that just stay online for months? Even longtime moderators and "posting freak"s generally have a Time Spent Online of 1 week to 2 months. Just for the most active comparison.

Thank you for reading! this may not even be helpful for anything relevant although I am happy to give advice when it's due.

When a user has been signed up and active for a longer time, it takes a couple extra moments to get rid of it. It's minuscule, but sometimes it allows the bot to post more if a moderator that has the option to delete those posts isn't online. We have some secret moderators that are able to easily purge a spammer on accounts that are new and have a lot of rapid posts, but many don't have the option to individually ban and delete. 

That's my only guess, other than maybe they created many bots and forgot to post on some of them.