Why start a question thread then immediately lock the thread?

I’m referring to the “Why have the bots taken over MP?” thread.

In any case, here’s an AI answer to the question posed:

The bot problem on forums has exploded recently, driven by several factors:

**Who’s making them:**

- **Spammers and scammers** - Traditional spam operations now use LLMs to create more convincing product promotions, scam links, and fake reviews

- **SEO manipulators** - Companies building backlinks to boost search rankings by posting links across forums

- **Political/influence operations** - State actors and activist groups pushing narratives or amplifying certain viewpoints

- **Crypto/NFT promoters** - Heavy automation to shill projects and tokens

- **Regular people with AI tools** - Some individuals just experimenting with ChatGPT/Claude API to automate engagement, not always maliciously

**Why the sudden surge:**

The accessibility of AI language models changed everything. Previously, bots were obvious because they used templates or broken English. Now with GPT-3.5/4, Claude, and similar models, anyone can generate contextually appropriate responses at scale for pennies. A single person can now simulate hundreds of forum participants.

**Their goals:**

- Drive traffic to monetized sites

- Manipulate discussions or sentiment

- Farm accounts to sell later

- Inflate engagement metrics

- Test and train better bots

**Why forums are vulnerable:**

Many forums haven’t updated their defenses beyond basic CAPTCHAs, which AI can now solve. Free forum software makes it easy to target thousands of sites. And smaller communities lack resources for sophisticated bot detection.

The problem’s getting worse because detection is an arms race - as defenses improve, bot operators adapt their AI prompts to seem more human.

I miss genuine interaction between real people. Forums such as this, or the local newspaper comment forum, used to be a joy. Now it’s a tedious mess of bots, or still some real people, but everyone with an agenda, it seems. Ten years ago it was fun. Today I find myself less inspired to engage. I will just say that I am an actual, real person. I post comments here and there when I feel like I’ve got something valuable to add (always subject to the thread‘s sentiment), when I think I have something to add of historical importance to a route or area or event (again, questionable), and sometimes I to try to inject a little humor into something (most questionable). Bots suck. Let’s all be real.

The fact you used AI to answer the question of why bots are taking over the forum is just...

 What color is the boathouse at Hereford! 

I don't know what our equivalent handshake needs to be, nor can we even discuss it on this forum.  Because they are listening.

Wow.  I'm kinda so down on life right now. Thanks, OP!  : )

Hi Marc, thanks for replying! I didn't mean to lock it. I must have accidentally locked it or something. I understand the reasoning for bots, it's just that none of the reasons seem to make sense for MP. Are Russian bots really trying to manipulate our discussions about climbing ethics and gear? lol How is whoever is making these bots benefitting, or what are they hoping to gain? 

I don't think that a majority of MP of forum posts are bots, but I'd be curious if someone with some skills could do an analysis of some sort. 

I have not seen any evidence that bots are active here on MP. I’ve seen a lot of uninformed people throw around accusations because they didn’t like what was posted or how it was worded. 

The most likely evidence of bots is when CBD spam gets sprayed across 10 forums. But even then, it is almost always cheaper to pay teenagers in the Philippines to do that, than to write lots of code to do that.

Hangdog Hank is correct that no one with the skill to automate posting to MP would have anything to gain by doing so. So: follow through on that reasoning! Give up the paranoia, everyone. You’re free. 

Hangdog Hankwrote:

Hi Marc, thanks for replying! I didn't mean to lock it. I must have accidentally locked it or something. I understand the reasoning for bots, it's just that none of the reasons seem to make sense for MP. Are Russian bots really trying to manipulate our discussions about climbing ethics and gear? lol How is whoever is making these bots benefitting, or what are they hoping to gain? 

I don't think that a majority of MP of forum posts are bots, but I'd be curious if someone with some skills could do an analysis of some sort. 

This is exactly what a bot would say!

Hangdog Hankwrote:

Hi Marc, thanks for replying! I didn't mean to lock it. I must have accidentally locked it or something. I understand the reasoning for bots, it's just that none of the reasons seem to make sense for MP. Are Russian bots really trying to manipulate our discussions about climbing ethics and gear? lol How is whoever is making these bots benefitting, or what are they hoping to gain? 

I don't think that a majority of MP of forum posts are bots, but I'd be curious if someone with some skills could do an analysis of some sort. 

The Climbing Industrial Complex and Big Bolt™️ are joining forces in a psyop to normalize rap bolting cliffs in a 4ft x 4ft grid to enable an eventual climbing takeover by an alien species that’s paralyzed the second they’re one nanometer above their bolt. Warm PBR is their Adrenochrome

You missed out on doing the funniest thing to this thread.

James -wrote:

I have not seen any evidence that bots are active here on MP. I’ve seen a lot of uninformed people throw around accusations because they didn’t like what was posted or how it was worded. 

The most likely evidence of bots is when CBD spam gets sprayed across 10 forums. But even then, it is almost always cheaper to pay teenagers in the Philippines to do that, than to write lots of code to do that.

Hangdog Hank is correct that no one with the skill to automate posting to MP would have anything to gain by doing so. So: follow through on that reasoning! Give up the paranoia, everyone. You’re free. 

Do you think this is a real person, who just happens to have dedicated their entire account to a business for English-language learning for Vietnamese speakers, then randomly piped in to give advice about how to avoid a pulley injury?
https://www.mountainproject.com/user/201144461/edu-life

I don't think bots have taken over by any means, and I think they are relatively infrequent, but they are getting more common and sometimes a bit better. Most of the non-obvious bots have a few mildly odd posts where it's a bit unclear whether or not they are a bot, so you may not notice them. Then they slip up and make a more obvious bot post that gets flagged, the entire account and all of its posts get removed within hours or a day, and there is no evidence left. Here is another bot post from a since-deleted account (it's unclear to me why the posts sometimes disappear and other times do not):

https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/202321509/getting-to-511a-sport

Here is another that is not yet banned (I was actually trying to find another bot with a similar name but randomly found this one instead. The rhyming nonsense name seemed to be a trend for a while):

https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/201040557/climbing-in-dr#ForumMessage-201221556

There was another that started nearly a dozen threads about random climbing-related topics before it became sufficiently obvious that they were a bot and their account was removed.

I also get the impression you haven't played around with AI much (correct me if I'm wrong). It would be far easier/cheaper to automate this than to pay real people to do this, or to have a hybrid version that is partially automated but with humans to get around obstacles related to sign-ins. Online scams alone are a multi-billion dollar industry, and I'm sure spamming, deceptive advertising, and influence campaigns are at least as big, so there is plenty of economic incentive to do this. To the extent that coding is required, the code and/or services get sold over the dark web, not redeveloped from scratch by an individual. There is also a second-hand market for accounts on social media and Reddit, with older accounts and those with more activity being more valuable, which could provide incentive for bots to lie low and make a random post every now and then without trying to sell anything. MP probably isn't a very high-value target for this because of it's size, but it wouldn't shock me if it was happening sometimes.

Tal Mwrote:

The Climbing Industrial Complex and Big Bolt™️ are joining forces in a psyop to normalize rap bolting cliffs in a 4ft x 4ft grid to enable an eventual climbing takeover by an alien species that’s paralyzed the second they’re one nanometer above their bolt. Warm PBR is their Adrenochrome

It's a small sample size, but bots seem to have strict climbing ethics.

Larry Morganwrote:

The fact you used AI to answer the question of why bots are taking over the forum is just...

AI has it's uses and its place; ie: just because it's AI doesn't mean it's automatically bad.

Hangdog Hankwrote:

Hi Marc, thanks for replying! I didn't mean to lock it. I must have accidentally locked it or something. I understand the reasoning for bots, it's just that none of the reasons seem to make sense for MP. Are Russian bots really trying to manipulate our discussions about climbing ethics and gear? lol How is whoever is making these bots benefitting, or what are they hoping to gain? 

I don't think that a majority of MP of forum posts are bots, but I'd be curious if someone with some skills could do an analysis of some sort. 

In that case I'll lock this thread and move over to your thread. ------>>>>> https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/202388495/why-have-the-bots-taken-over-mp