* Ryan Kaldari wrote:
I just read the following paper which describes an interesting study that was conducted regarding IRC: http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf
The researchers created several IRC bots with different names - some female, some male, and some ambiguous. They put the bots in several high traffic IRC channels, and had them record all the private messages they received. The bots themselves were completely silent.
It seems only some of the bots were silent. I could not find how they determined there were humans on the other hand. If I ran spambots that tried to lure people on malicious web sites or whatever, I would make them pick out new users or users with unusual nicknames, as they would otherwise be quickly discovered and probably only hit experienced users who are not too likely to fall for this kind of thing. Also, a channel like "#poker" sounds more like a nest for spambots. Similarily, my im- pression is that the networks they used do not require anything special to send private messages. In contrast, on Freenode these days you have to authenticate to services which in turn requires registration which in turn requires confirming an e-mail address, as I recall it anyway. If you don't have that, spambots should not be a big surprise. In the ten years I've hung out on freenode, I got maybe one or two messages that might fall vaguely in any of the categories here, so this isn't telling me much really.
Long before freenode, pretty much the first IRC channel I got on was by invitation. My internet service provider was sending out incorrect bills to users of a recently introduced service and I was looking for other victims and was told several people in that channel had the same trouble so I went there and chatted with folks in the channel. Turned out that the vast majority of people there were lesbians. Don't recall attacks on that network either, but that was in the 1990s before spam was a notable problem.