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male
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westbourne383
writes:People state "Do not feed the troll", and some questions on this site have been doubted over their authenticity.However, they're not always trolls.What they could be is bot-generated content, using something called Sybil attack, where a bot or user uses multiple identities for malicious intent.On this site, the bot accounts will often use content cut-and-pasted from elsewhere, on topics relating to:SexUnderwearFast foodTravelLGBTQ issuesEthnicity (this often uses information from Wikipedia where they have pages such as "Italian-American", "Argentine-Canadian" etc. since those articles are free to reuse)COVID-19/ZoomFashion (references to crop tops and lingerie)The writing appears to be formatted badly, suggesting machine translation or recursive translation, and uses various names from either name generator sites or pseudonyms.The writing always is focused on a hot-button issue.It doesn't appear to be a troll, but more likely to be a black-hat forum user trying to spamdex this site with poorly-written questions.These sort of spamdexing originates from many countries, often the U.S and Canada, but also Italy, Japan, Sweden etc.What these users' motivation is, well, no-one knows, really.But, be warned! Not all questions are as bad as they seem, some are false positives (i.e. a result that indicates a given condition when it's not true, e.g. you are pregnant when you're not actually).Some people have difficulty using sites like this and this can explain why their writing skills are poor.The moral is "Be on your guard against trolls, but always keep an open mind".And as it stands, be careful, and enjoy this site! Reply to this Article
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reader, westbourne383 +, writes (2 January 2022):
westbourne383 is verified as being by the original poster of the questionWiseOwlE, thank you! And nice username too.
I think it's some sort of disinformation/misinformation campaign; however, there are questions like http://www.dearcupid.org/question/should-i-tell-his-wife-i-found-out.html which seem genuine enough, so sorting the wheat from the chaff is hard on here.
I'd be a moderator if I could, but it's unlikely to happen.
A
reader, anonymous, writes (29 December 2021): I do agree with westbourne383. I think a lot of the trollers are bots; because they are repetitive, seem spamish, and tend to come in close succession. Often appearing under different names, pseudonyms, or as a regular poster. There are hostile countries (or hateful readers) with malintent; just hoping to make the site fail.
I either don't respond to them; or if I do; I will call them out as suspected pranksters or rascals. I will respond, only if I feel the readership with a related issue might benefit from the advice, not necessarily taking the bait. They could be from competitive websites intending to turn-off, or decline, our readership. Submitting gross or controversial topics, they know most of our readers may have a distaste for. Hoping to inundate our moderators with trash; so actual submissions from original posters get delayed, or may not get published on the site for many days. I appreciate the good advice offered. I will keep it all in-mind.
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A
female
reader, RubyBirtle +, writes (27 December 2021):
I'm not sure I completely agree that it's a bot posting all the Troll questions. SOME of them may be a bot but not all of them. Why a bot would target a site like this? We don't get much traffic here.
Having looked at Wikipedia I can't see that any great swathes of text that have been copied and pasted from there - were there any specific posts that you had in mind that did this?
And I don't agree that the posts are poorly written. The ones I'm thinking about are actually quite WELL written - the poster capitalises properly, makes good use of grammar and writes in legible paragraphs which many of our posters don't do.
If it is a bot that is cutting and pasting from other sites, then they've all been copied from one original author. People's style of writing is as unique as a fingerprint. Not just their subject matter but their vocabulary, the way they construct sentences, the way they capitalise and the way they construct paragraphs. I may not be a forensic writing analyst but the posts I'm thinking about definitely come from the same author.
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