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.
It's so weird. For fun, I made it so that if you try to visit my IP address directly (instead of going to a vhost) you get a form that sends me an e-mail. A few days after I put it on, I started getting daily mails just saying "0x[]=androxgh0st". What does it mean?!
hell, I administrate multiple websites and that "real rap ed woman" spam (which has been going on for a long while now) is getting out of hand in the last few days. I don't even know what is it's goal, but all files it links to are being hosted on different premium file hosts (meaning you need to pay the file host some money to download). Truly getting sick of it.
One more thing, it's man-made. I confirmed this multiple times by watching its patterns (e.g. posting in an existing thread to see which part of his message is being blocked by the regex filter i implemented, making a word play on the blocked part etc)