A question - sort of .
i have been noticing an uptick in one line posts from users that have ONLY one post .
I am starting to think that many many bots are responsible .

Is there any support for a Minimal post length .

and yes this is a short post .

This forum already has a minimum post length. I tried to reply with just the letter a, and the forum said "The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 3 characters."

A couple of '1st post' threads I've seen here lately are from people who joined a long time ago. Maybe I'm seeing different posts to you John VV, but I havent seen much evidence for there being more spam-bots.

Minimum message length is something that can be set by the forum admins. I used to use one forum that had a 10 character minimum post length. You'd get a fair few short (mainly yes/no) responses, with '10 char' tacked on the end of the message.

If you suspect that members are spambots, then you should be investigating them. Use Google to see if the contents of their posts appear on other forums (esp. under the same username!). Check their profiles for anything incriminating. If you don't find anything, then bookmark their profiles and check them periodically to see how their subsequent posts look.

is it possible to lengthen the 3 char limit on thread originator posts?

TG

There is this user 'murgatruth' who has several oneline posts - mainly bitching about the puppy forum. I think it may be a spambot but then I do not have the expertise in these things and I want someone experienced to handle the case and tell me if I am right or wrong.
I did not report the post as I am not sure of what exactly is happening here.
Hope someone who can track this down reads it.

It is just that i think i am seeing a trend .If others are or are not then ....
things i have noticed

Single posts that are very vague or look like a 8 year old posted it .

A user from 2002 to `06 with 4 posts posting after 4 years , odd but can happen. However wrote in textspeek .

The increasing use of "textspeek" can make things a bit hard to judge if the poster is a person or not .

And that AI's ARE getting better .

now these are not the VERY obvious spammers posts .

No he doesn't. He has two posts in total, of which one is single-line and it's in the Introductions forum. I think he's a person.

I also don't get why SilverBack overreacted so much to the fact that he mentioned that he didn't like the Puppy Linux forums in his intro. What's wrong with not liking one forum and joining another to be able to ask questions?

Nothing!

But at the same time I am not sure, if it would be considered a tolerable behavior, if I'd create a thread on LinuxForums.com to tell them that LQ sucks!

Reasons:
1. I have no right to degrade LQ's name elsewhere on the net.
2. It might lead to flamewars, if a LQ fanatic reads that post of mine.
3. It'll also show that I have zero knowledge of forum manners, therefore I and my posts might not be taken seriously there.

P.S:
Have you read his second post?

Well, I am sorry if you think I overreacted. I just cant see why a person has to bad mouth another forum in LQ. Makes no sence to me. And even if someone does bad mouth about a forum what does he hope we should say? Should we extend some sympathy?
I have been on LQ for some time now. I sometimes have been treated harshly but then I took it as a part of learning process and moved on. Never did it cross my mind to quit LQ and be somewhere else - but then again that is just me.
Like I said if your posts are not constructive or informative or plain fun (which would go in general section) do not post at all. I post with this principle and I am not asking anyone else to do the same.
Anyway, if you guys, my peers think I over reacted then I apologise. Let bygones be bygones and we would see what is the best that we can do here at LQ.

Under the ancient laws of Netiquette, it is bad form to join a forum just to bad mouth a different forum - the LinuxForums/LQ example up above is a good one. Basically, if you have an issue with a board that is not LQ (or owned by Jeremy) there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. We have no powers over any other board and they have no responsibility to listen to us if we raised an issue with them. The only people who can do anything about any forum are the admin of that board, the moderators of the board, the members of the board and the individual who is complaining. I have quit a number of forums that I thought were either over-run with nonsense or weren't serving my needs. The fact that I am still at LQ after 9 years is testament to the the membership here.

1 members found this post helpful.

this is getting a bit OT

Personally i do not want to mark a thread as "spam" on only MY own hunch .I have a few times .
Now if I and 2 or 3 or 4 others have a ? about it,or are just not sure and posted a concern on the thread .
Then marking it as spam and removing it might be called for .

an example might be the foss survey
now that was a real person BUT there were questions about it

a real world example
this post
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...fedora-886222/

I see no reason to believe that that poster is anything but a (new, human) poster.

Just to give you an idea of how complicated this is, here are two extremely bot-ish posts by what I'm 100% sure are actual human posters:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...7/#post4386285
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...9/#post4382594

Look through their posting history and draw your own conclusions.