For a while now I’ve been meaning to make a thread dedicated to the amusing antics of these strange creatures, and when Woody shared some of his sightings with me I finally decided to do it because they definitely take the cake so far. I’ll let him post those in a moment, but first I’ll represent my own highlight sightings from the past.
There’s this little gem, which displays a double enigma.
First of all, of course bots can’t post. But even if they could, it couldn’t be in City Hall. A truly bizarre moment.
Discussion of that incident can be found here.
On a few occasions the site has been completely overrun with guests who, thanks to KF’s admin vision, we found were all bots.
We still have no explanation for those occurrences.
And finally, Dan shared a moment where a bot actually made it all the way into the chat room. A truly remarkable achievement.
Jun 21 21:35:46 * CC (cgiirc@tl-A6F69~007.googlebot.com) has joined #aio
Jun 21 21:36:58 <Tim> Wow.
Jun 21 21:39:03 <Tim> I think that's actually one of Google's web crawlers that was poking around the chat site and managed to get far enough into the CGI:IRC interface to activate the chat connection.
Jun 21 21:39:03 * CC has quit (Quit: CGI:IRC (EOF))
Jun 21 21:40:17 <Tim> I can't say I've ever seen that happen before.
Jun 21 21:41:09 <SomeoneElse> What was it doing?
Jun 21 21:41:25 <SomeoneElse> lol web crawler's sounds way too much like bugs.. *shudders*
Jun 21 21:41:49 <Tim> Reading web pages like it always does. That's how Google finds out what's on the web to let you search it.
Jun 21 21:42:09 <SomeoneElse> So it's not going to like spam us?
Jun 21 21:42:22 * CC (cgiirc@tl-A6F6~9007.googlebot.com) has joined #aio
Jun 21 21:42:35 <Tim> It so happens that the CGI:IRC chat page looks enough like a normal web page that it loaded it and caused a chat connection to start.
Jun 21 21:43:44 <Tim> No, it's not capable of understanding how to type things. It's like a little kid pressing whatever buttons it can find, with no knowledge of what it might be doing.
Jun 21 21:46:07 * CC has quit (Quit: CGI:IRC (EOF))
Jun 21 21:48:53 * CC (cgiirc@tl-A6F6~9007.googlebot.com) has joined #aio
Jun 21 21:49:05 <Tim> It's gotten onto a few other networks, it seems. Google's cache of EFnet's chat page shows the transcript of the bot accidentally logging in.
Jun 21 21:50:38 <Tim> Despite the amusement this causes, I can put up a sign telling the Googlebot not to stick its fingers in those sockets.
Jun 21 21:51:50 * CC has quit (Quit: CGI:IRC (EOF))
Jun 21 21:53:12 <Tim> The impressive part is the fact that in order to get to that page, it had to enter a nick *and* choose the CGI:IRC radio button *and* press "Chat."
These are certainly strange and mysterious entities. If you make interesting observations of your own, post them here!