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Currently navigating or doing anything is slow as hell on Dakka, but I have zero issues with anything else online.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

I was until about... now.

The whole forum was Inaccessible for a while...

Apparently they rebooted the server?
I'm just assuming, but everything is faster now.

We were getting hammered by bots again. The wave appears to be past.

 insaniak wrote:
We were getting hammered by bots again. The wave appears to be past.

My tech skills are firmly stuck between Civil War Field Surgeon and Adeptus Mechanius Bolt Tightener #16637272.A...

Are bot attacks a common occurrence these days?

Sadly, yes, in this wonderful age of AI, having parts of the internet periodically rendered unusable is the price we pay for access to dodgy medical advice and pictures of cats with six fingers.

 insaniak wrote:
Sadly, yes, in this wonderful age of AI, having parts of the internet periodically rendered unusable is the price we pay for access to dodgy medical advice and pictures of cats with six fingers.

Is that what most of the numbers of users online are... bots?

A large chunk of the current 'most users ever' number likely is. For the rest, it's not always bots. They tend to wander in every few weeks, make a nuisance of themselves for a while, and then vanish into the ether again.

 insaniak wrote:
A large chunk of the current 'most users ever' number likely is. For the rest, it's not always bots. They tend to wander in every few weeks, make a nuisance of themselves for a while, and then vanish into the ether again.

Why do people use them? What's their intended purpose?

They scrape for data, info, anything really that can be used for their purposes. It used to be that ad-bots would drop incoherent replies and crudely link to whatever they're shilling, but these days, bots can almost gak out coherent replies on topic enough that they fly under the radar.

 BrookM wrote:
They scrape for data, info, anything really that can be used for their purposes. It used to be that ad-bots would drop incoherent replies and crudely link to whatever they're shilling, but these days, bots can almost gak out coherent replies on topic enough that they fly under the radar.

Thank goodnessmy incoherent replies will never be considered bot-like.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 BrookM wrote:
They scrape for data, info, anything really that can be used for their purposes. It used to be that ad-bots would drop incoherent replies and crudely link to whatever they're shilling, but these days, bots can almost gak out coherent replies on topic enough that they fly under the radar.

Thank goodnessmy incoherent replies will never be considered bot-like.

That's exactly what a spam-bot would say.

 Dysartes wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 BrookM wrote:
They scrape for data, info, anything really that can be used for their purposes. It used to be that ad-bots would drop incoherent replies and crudely link to whatever they're shilling, but these days, bots can almost gak out coherent replies on topic enough that they fly under the radar.

Thank goodnessmy incoherent replies will never be considered bot-like.

That's exactly what a spam-bot would say.

Thankful I am, yes! My replies, they are incoherent, but never bot-like, no! Haha, human I am, yes! Confusion is my specialty, yes!

Spam is definitely against the rules though and Nuts and Bolts is certainly not the place to post it.