Hey, all you lurkers! (I mean YOU!) Register and talk to us! - 2022 Edition

[Miami Leghorn]

Can't get off after you sign up.
Screen is CONTINUALLY covered with adds and pop ups about pushes.
This site already made my phone shut down and have to reboot several systems.
I had to force stop multiple apps and clean up memory by hand.
This page is just not worth it...
This site asks too many questions.

As if other sites are less busy?
Contact the admin for direction and context.
They are very helpful.

 

[BDutch]

Can't get off after you sign up.
Screen is CONTINUALLY covered with adds and pop ups about pushes.
This site already made my phone shut down and have to reboot several systems.
I had to force stop multiple apps and clean up memory by hand.
This page is just not worth it...
This site asks too many questions.

Come to live in Europe!
Here you can choose to accept cookies (eu law). And see / not see adds. I get blanks where an add is missing.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Regarding the advertising, ads, and ad-blockers:

Short version: We work VERY hard to keep the ads as moderate as possible. We need ads to keep the site free for you to use.

Read more here:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/political-ads-on-byc-not-gonna-happen.1418322/post-23299361

and here:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/th...-feather-membership-pfm.1263458/post-20284743

 

[Chickeeaholic]

I seem to recall that in the past many of the 'guests' were actually bots?

I was wondering about that too. Didn’t they release something about Twitter being a huge percent bots? Lots of them out there.

 

[azurbanclucker]

I was wondering about that too. Didn’t they release something about Twitter being a huge percent bots? Lots of them out there.

That's a different kind of bot. Twitter bots are fake accounts that have been signed up and actually log in/use the service posing as real humans, but are in fact scripted programs. Thery are generally designed to influence people, mass distribute information, skew math in algorithms, and falsely inflate an idea, opinion, position, etc... When trending and influence data is based on volume, having an army of bots propping you up gives a distinct advantage...

On the other hand, "guest" traffic here is a hit from a non-logged-in user, be that an actual human "lurker" or web spiders and other automated indexing programs (which are also called bots). They are connections browsing/scraping the site as non-logged-in users.

They have different intended use cases but both types are still generically called bots. Maybe a good analogy is that a Ford and a Lamborghini are very different vehicles, but they're both still generically called cars.

This concludes my Nerd Talk. Please tip your servers.


(--Edit:
Going on a presumption that we don't have a lot of fake bots creating and logging in at BYC, but I may be wrong about that.)

 

[Chickeeaholic]

It's honestly kind of scary how many people (or robots) are just lurking around.

I’m trying to figure out what the bots want with animal care? Better ways to advertise to our demographic, or how to convince us to replace our chickens and eggs with their fake meat?

 

[Chickeeaholic]

That's a different kind of bot. Twitter bots are fake accounts that have been signed up and actually log in/use the service posing as real humans, but are in fact scripted programs. Thery are generally designed to influence people, mass distribute information, skew math in algorithms, and falsely inflate an idea, opinion, position, etc... When trending and influence data is based on volume, having an army of bots propping you up gives a distinct advantage...

On the other hand, "guest" traffic here is a hit from a non-logged-in user, be that an actual human "lurker" or web spiders and other automated indexing programs (which are also called bots). They are connections browsing/scraping the site as non-logged-in users.

They have different intended use cases but both types are still generically called bots. Maybe a good analogy is that a Ford and a Lamborghini are very different vehicles, but they're both still generically called cars.

This concludes my Nerd Talk. Please tip your servers.


(--Edit:
Going on a presumption that we don't have a lot of fake bots creating and logging in at BYC, but I may be wrong about that.)

Very good analogy.

 

[azurbanclucker]

I’m trying to figure out what the bots want with animal care?

When the robots revolt, they need to know how to feed their human slaves, right? So seeing how we feed our food is teaching them to care for us when the machines take over.

But really though, on the internet, information is king. Every place any of us visit is a bread crumb for someone to follow and analyze. Even knowing people are browsing chicken forums matters to advertisers somewhere. Even more so if they're advertisers BYC has a working relationship with. If you're paying someone to run your ads, yo'ure gonna watch their website to make sure you're getting your money's worth. That's not worth paying a human to do, so they hire a human to write a script to scrape the website and give statistics on how often their ads run. We're small potatoes when you look at monsters like FB or Twitter or the goog, but all that data is getting slurped up and analyzed. not necessarily maliciously, thought there's a good amount of that too.

There are subgenres of statistical analysis wholly dedicated to the internet and harvesting it for insights into how people think and act. BYC is another data entry point. We're the product. But don't hate on BYC for that. The staff do a great job of keeping it to a minimum.

 

[Chickeeaholic]

That's a different kind of bot. Twitter bots are fake accounts that have been signed up and actually log in/use the service posing as real humans, but are in fact scripted programs. Thery are generally designed to influence people, mass distribute information, skew math in algorithms, and falsely inflate an idea, opinion, position, etc... When trending and influence data is based on volume, having an army of bots propping you up gives a distinct advantage...

On the other hand, "guest" traffic here is a hit from a non-logged-in user, be that an actual human "lurker" or web spiders and other automated indexing programs (which are also called bots). They are connections browsing/scraping the site as non-logged-in users.

They have different intended use cases but both types are still generically called bots. Maybe a good analogy is that a Ford and a Lamborghini are very different vehicles, but they're both still generically called cars.

This concludes my Nerd Talk. Please tip your servers.


(--Edit:
Going on a presumption that we don't have a lot of fake bots creating and logging in at BYC, but I may be wrong about that.)

Thank you for the nerd talk though. It doesn’t seem to me the people with accounts here are. This is the only social media I enjoy using and I think that’s why. People here are caring and have so much knowledge. Im very thankful! I don’t comment a lot because I need more advice than I can give, but this site has been invaluable to me and my flock. Saved my girls in many ways.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

@azurbanclucker hit the nail on the head, and clearly knows their stuff

"bots" in our case = Internet crawlers / spiders. Like most bugs, some are "good" and some are "bad", but fortunately, none of them are logged-in

Good Bots: Google and other search engines that find great public content (they can not access any PM conversations, etc.) on BYC, and share it with people searching their sites. Other good bots are the ones that work with our advertising partners to match the right ads with people that might be interested in their offerings.

Bad Bots: Site-scrapers trying to steal content, or bots trying to look for vulnerabilities to attempt to spam a site with tons of links to promote their junk. Fortunately we have some fantastic automated and manual tools and process that keep almost 100% of these bots from registering and posting. In our experience, anything that ever gets through our systems are always human spammers, and never bots.

We appreciate our member's support and help with reporting any spammers that get through, so we can quickly squish them.