Ummm... why is there a spamload of members online recently with random numbers and letters?

They are spambots

Did they post anything? I can't remeber...

Mostly in the blogs because no one ever checks those.

I, for one was very disappointed to find that DaHamlet was not an actual person because that's like the best username ever.

Hamlet in da hoooood.

But actually, what are the spambots trying to do?

They want to take over all blogs and start the spambot apocalypse.

Didier wrote:But actually, what are the spambots trying to do?

It's usually an attempt to boost search rankings by getting a lot of links to the site from other sites. The number of people who'll actually follow the links spammed to forums/wikis/etc is minimal, but it's easier to fool a search engine into thinking a link is relevant. Although of course the search engines work quite hard to figure out when links are dodgy and penalise them instead.

'Penalise'. Sounds like they are going to online court or something.

Just how do you fool a search engine?

You need to look to the search engine's algorithms like an actual human being who posted a relevant link, rather than something spamming links. This is why the bots tend to post or generate a bunch of text around their links now - a few years ago you'd just get a solid wall of links, but then search engines wised up to that.

Can't they recognize the content of the text, or if the structure makes sense?

Well, I wonder if then you might also accidentally block out people with rusty english skills :P

It might discourage people to use l33tsp34k. That is not a bad thing, in my opinion.

They should be able to tell apart bad english from random nonesense.

Check out some of the spambot blog posts sometime. Many of them "speak" solid English. Although it still reads like a complete advertisement so they're not too difficult to spot.

Have you looked at the ones that 'speak' in a foreign tounge? Those are usually a disaster!

I swear sometimes its like they just take a block of text from google translate and hope it"s gramatically correct

I don't think they care a jot about geammatically correct, from what I read. Google translate is never ever grammatically correct.