There is a rec list diary here talking about the thousands of "new members" flooding into Daily Kos over the past few weeks. As pointed out in the diary, all of the members share a common characteristic: a user name that looks more or less legitimate, followed by some digits.
I decided to do a little more research, and discovered a few more common characteristics of these new accounts. Join me for a few more grafs below the fold for some interesting/potentially-alarming data.
I tried what Happy Camper suggested in his comment: use the Daily Kos search utility to look for new accounts. Sure enough, over 4,000 new accounts in two days. And, almost all of them followed the pattern noted.
Hmm. Wonder if I can use Teh Google to find out more about any of them? So, I copied a name that certainly could be legit and put it into Google without the numbers. Sure enough, there was someone with that user name on Twitter. They had tweeted (some time ago), they were on some other sites -- I even found a name and a city. Looks like a real person.
BUT --
When I added the numbers, I still got results -- a whole different set of results. And the results are the same for all the accounts I tried.
- All the account names can be found on other sites.
- All the account names have joined PR Web in the past few days.
- All the account names have joined other sites, including Skirt.com, Cruising World, BabyCenter, and Bravo TV, on the same day they have joined Daily Kos.
On some sites, the users have posted content. Here is an example:
Retaining the Galaxy S3 searching more modern for longer, this samsung galaxy s cases shields the again and sides from daily harm from bumps, drops, scrapes and scratches. It also allows accessibility to all the critical ports and characteristics of the S3 so that it stays entirely working at all occasions.
What's interesting about the content is that often it is somewhat relevant to the site. For example, one post at BabyCenter was about how to prevent sinus infections. But, then it took off on burying your slow-cooker.
So, it seems obvious to me that either there is an ongoing bot campaign to sign up at many sites for some reason, OR there is a campaign to sign up many bots here and attempt to make it look legit by joining elsewhere.
It's also interesting that someone either went to the trouble of writing software to generate close-to-topic content that looks sorta legitimate until you actually try to read it, OR they have paid someone to copy and paste some of this stuff as they interact with the various sites.
Why is this happening? Don't know. Don't want to speculate, either. Could be just normal internet spam stuff. Or, it could be an election year and the sysadmins at dKos need to start taking counter-measures.
Tue Jun 26, 2012 at 9:50 PM PT: UPDATE: In going back and gathering data for this diary, I've noticed that some of the accounts on other sites are already closed. Either they triggered some sort of bot-blocking software, or the site is small enough that the admin can hunt down bots manually. Here's hoping the same message happens here: "This account is closed."