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Message: [QUOTE="Waterbug, post: 170371, member: 2322"] So you.... ...bought more barley straw? Yeah, it should work this time. The world needs more optimists. In the past couple of days I've been researching forum bots and experimenting with them. They've been around a long time and are widely used, including by the forum owners. They do indeed seem human and people do interact with them. At least, I assume the interaction is human. Could be other bots. This thread would be typical bot behavior. Poster's location is generic UK rather than a city. Starting a thread is the easiest and oldest method. But placing a link to a product to buy in that first post is now obvious. Posting a response to it's own post and placing the link there is one step up. The third post responding to John would be difficult, but maybe not that hard. Posts about barley have been around for a long time, all basically the same, lots of data to use to determine responses. So richyd, I gotta ask...are you a bot? My bot had flagged your first post for a response and wanted to post with a link to a product but I stopped it. I'm just experimenting so I'm not letting it to commit posts without my review. I got suspicious that maybe this was a tactic to detect bots. I'm finding this all very fascinating. I think the web may be changing human behavior more in such a short period than at any another time in human history. It's like living Sci-Fi. It begs the question of whether bots are good or evil. They certainly used to be evil. But they evolved to act so much like humans that humans can't seem to tell the difference. Is that bad? If a bot posts a question and I write an answer what's the harm? I enjoyed writing the answer. It's just as entertaining for me. [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill"]Blue pill or red pill[/URL]? Yeah, [URL="http://www.waterbugdesign.com/pond/myths/barley.html"]barley is a complete scam[/URL]. But I don't think that's really the point. Barley is a blue pill and what's wrong with that? If it makes someone happy even if only for the short term. And there's a good chance that the algae would die anyways in the 6-8 weeks these products claim to need to work, so the owner has every chance of "being right". [/QUOTE]

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