I once uploaded Kareha onto a server I was running from home, purely just to test the software and study the code. I didn't advertise the board to anybody, and only made three test threads. Amazingly, after having forgotten about the board, and coming back a year later, I found it full of spam and links.

Everybody knows about textboard spam, wakaba's /soc/ board was removed after being spammed to oblivion, the site that wrote the original gazouBBS (futaba's sourcecode) script's demonstration boards were also full of spam comments written in English, so on, we've all seen it.

Where is it actually coming from though? Has anybody ever gone down the rabbithole of internet spam and bots? How do they find no-name sites that nobody visits? What is their end goal? Who actually runs these bots? Is anybody even running these bots or have they been on autopilot for decades? Is there a network of spammers? What is your experience with spam?

Within the past three years or so, "scambaiting" has become a popular genre of youtube and twitch content, with people investigating tech support scammers and robotcallers and whatnot, but I feel like nobody really cares about the rabbithole of people spamming on websites, when it is just as vast and fascinating.