A heROic Undertaking

[Whispers]

The day before yesterday, I noticed that one of the people celebrating their birthday was a bot advertising some fetish site.??I reported it, Panda banned them and erased all porn-info on the profile.??The next day, the exact same thing happened, but this person had registered a week or so prior.??So, I decided to search the member list for more of these bots.

Of the ~147 people registered so far this month, 60 of them are bots advertising everything from porn to shoes to random blogs.??That's more than 40% of the accounts registered this month.??Today, alone, four bots were registered with our forums.

I am posting this here because we need help finding more bots like this.??I have only searched March of this year and that took at least an hour.??I don't know how long these bots have been registering with us, but I know they go into February since one bot celebrates a "birthday" today and they registered February 27th.

What I am suggesting is that those who are willing to help search a certain time frame within the member list.??I have done all of March and I continue to check all new accounts for fraud, but there are too many for me to find by myself.

If you wish to help, please post herein what time frame you will be scanning (Feb 15-28th, all of Feb, Feb 20-28th, etc.) and then sending the names of any accounts you feel fraudulent to the GM's via Support Ticket.
Posting what time frame you will be scanning here, in this thread, will help to prevent two people scanning the same period.??It took me an hour to scan just fifteen days.??Please keep this in mind.??This is rather time-consuming and we need to delegate work responsibly.

I do not know how long ago these bots began registering with us.??It could be mid-February, it could be some time in 2009.??I don't know and neither do the GM's.??This is news to all of us (at least the severity of it is).??So, we just need to keep scanning until we can find no more.

Like I said, I am taking it upon myself to check every new account created.??So, you don't need to worry about that.??We need more people to help search for accounts registered in the past.??I'm going to bed now, but I will search more tomorrow.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is what is clogging the forums, but no matter.??There's disgusting (DISGUSTING) things being advertised here on heRO, and we need to work together to get rid of it.

Whoever wishes to help, post herein.

Thank you.

[Aaronock]

I think a lot of you don't realize that some of these "bots" aren't actually "bots" but real people paid to sign up for forums and advertise these items. This is why sometimes they talk about things related to RO because they did a little research to talk about things on here to lull us into a sense of security.

I'm not saying that what they do is any more justified but its wrong to call them bots all the same. :D

And the forums are going to get a cleanup in the near future anyway. If people or bots or whatever sign up for the forum but aren't really posting anything...why do we need to ban them? Isn't that claiming they are guilty before proven of a crime?

[Whispers]

Actually, most of these accounts had a total online time of less than 15 seconds. If you can put all of the information into one profile as they do in less than fifteen seconds, you deserve a medal.

[Whispers]

I've recently discovered something about two of our false accounts being created recently.

If you'll notice, one of our false accounts, monty43spears, avatar is exactly that of Cobbinator92 and another false account, fuer2gou is advertising all things Mulberry. I'm not implying that Cobbinator92 and Mulberry are making these accounts, but rather that perhaps the bots or proprietors thereof are using information from our forums to make their false accounts.

I think this is kind of a big deal.??