Ervin Binning

Forostar

Forostar

Ancient Mariner
Could someone please get rid of a member named Ervin Binning?

I'm sure he's some kind of bot, because the only thing "he"'s been doing since registration is this:

Ervin Binning   20:00:53   Viewing Ervin Binning's profile.
 
the big deal is whenever he is online he is looking at his profile.
 
I googled his email address and he does the same thing on other forums. His username is always a first and last name and he doesn't have any post on any forum. I think it is quite obvious that this is a bot.
 
Bots are short of "robots", eg. computer programs acting as humans. The original usage of bots was on IRC. You have a nickname there which isn't a human, it's a computer program, which does various automated tasks, like channel administration (ChanServ), talk logging, trivia games, services (like Seen, so it tells you when some user was last seen on the channel), etc..

In a nutshell, bots are computer programs doing automated tasks. The morality of the task is left upon the programmer or bot admin.
 
Zare said:
Bots are short of "robots", eg. computer programs acting as humans.
Click to expand...

You are thinking of Capek's idea of a robot in his play R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots) in which he has a factory of "artificial people." His idea of robots is more akin to our modern idea of an android or cyborg... a mechanical entity that looks and behaves as a human being.

"Classic" robots are mechanical, sometimes autonomous and designed to do repeated mindless tasks and usually just one (like on an assembly line.

the internet "bot" is, as you mentioned, a computer program made to perform simple tasks: spam mail, sex chat, advertise, etc.... not necessarily "human" behavior... merely automated.

[/attempt to turn into serious discussion]
 
In Soviet Russia, robots program you!
...actually that brings up a nice idea about a new avatar :)
 
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