It just dawned on me,

**Mechanic688** · 10-09-2011, 11:15 PM

For at least the last week I've noticed from 80 to over a hundred guests on our site and I was just curious if they were all real people or are they a bunch of spambots? If their all actual guests, we're going to have a lot bigger family here.

**IdahoScrapper** · 10-10-2011, 12:00 AM

With 5,642 members I have to believe quite a few are spambots.

**jackshmuc** · 10-10-2011, 12:14 AM

I made a robot once out of a remote control VW beetle. I took the horn wires off and hooked them to a relay that launched a miniature catapult so I could drive up to some one and throw stuff at them. the only problem was that what ever I put on the catapult would fall out before i could drive down the street if it worked i could have launched spam from a can at any "spambots" with in driving range.

**Mechanic688** · 10-10-2011, 12:17 AM

Or could be some family members checking on posts without actually logging in, maybe???

I made a robot once out of a remote control VW beetle. I took the horn wires off and hooked them to a relay that launched a miniature catapult so I could drive up to some one and throw stuff at them. the only problem was that what ever I put on the catapult would fall out before i could drive down the street if it worked i could have launched spam from a can at any "spambots" with in driving range.

HUH??? Did I miss something?

**EcoSafe** · 10-10-2011, 01:50 AM

Its human nature . less then 10 % of the people who lerk here will ever post a word.

**Bobby** · 10-10-2011, 06:59 AM

Originally Posted by Mechanic688

Or could be some family members checking on posts without actually logging in, maybe???

I have been on for a little over a week w/o signing in. Phone died and I wasn't going to put my passwords in the temp phone I got from best buy.. the last two I have got had other peoples passwords saved..Facebook, Twitter, gmail, among others lol

**jassiejames** · 10-10-2011, 07:46 AM

Spambots and lurkers galore!!! I guess I am what u call a lurker, I have read most everything here, and look forward to new posts for information and humor. On the other hand, I am fairly new to scrap and am srtictly small-time. (looking for copper and have no space.) Most of my Q's have been answered by reading the threads and I don't feel I have much to contribute as of yet, so no posts from me. I picked up 4 TV's , 2 vacs, and 1 compressor this morning to add to my copper stash, No real reason to post a pic of 4 dead TV'S in my book. I think there are many lurker types here gleaning information and trying to put it to good use, like me. As for spambots, I think that is mostly Private Personal Information gathering, hell, I can use a computer, I can break a computer and break one down, But Info Tech is like advanced math to me.

Happy scrapping.

**Ditchdigger** · 10-10-2011, 12:46 PM

Not spambots per se, but not humans either. Most likely, most of the guests you see are search engine "spiders", reading the threads and cataloging their contents. That's how the search engines are able to find stuff on the web for you. They come here and read everything they can, and keep track of it, so that when you do an internet search, they can point you in this direction.

Also, depending on how the forum software is set up, they may be shown as being "online" here for some amount of time after they've read a thread, so it appears that there's a lot more users reading than are actually here.

BTW, if you click on the place where it shows you the number of users online, it'll give you a list of who they are and what thread they've most recently visited.