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.
I find it hard to imagine an actual SEA sweatshop specialized on finding unused or unmoderated textboard installations... I'm guessing it's the occasional worker stumbling across a board and dumping all of his scheduled content there. Finding them is probably easy enough, just search for "kareha.pl".
It would be interesting to compare IPs and other patterns, but I'm doubt any active admins keep records of deleted herbal remedy links, and in the case of boards filled with spam there's probably some reason for the admin to be completely absent.
I more wonder how often boards get hit with it out of malice, like how arisuchan was hit with a CP bomb that made the admins give up, rather than just being caught in an automated thing.
>>3
Rumor has it the occasional CP ad threads that have been popping up on niche IBs lately are manual rather than automated.
>>3,4
Just recently 7clams was hit with a cp bomb. relatively obscure hidden board that was run on the domain that 7chan hosts a lot of static files from. Was up for over 10 years before the bomb. Sad.
It feels like running your own anonymous imageboard or even textboard is just too risky these days thanks to the CP bombers, and there's not much point in running one when people are just going to use the big 2 imageboards anyways. It's a shame people just give up, I miss small cozy imageboards like shanachan so much.