I'm uncomfortable just reading this topic. Bot shock? If it's an obvious bot, why open the thread to read/view it?
I don't get it ....
I agree completely...but...in most cases scanning through the list of new posts allows one to immediately spot the obvious ones and they are easy to then simply ignore. I have reported a bunch of bots, but there's no way I would ever open a bot thread just to report it.
But on other occasions, a bot invades an existing thread, sometimes one which I have been following for awhile, and just appears in the thread as a regular poster. Those are the ones I happily report. This happened with one very recently; I don't remember which thread it was, but the Slayer bot popped up in the conversation with an entire string of child-porn-sounding links, each in a separate post. Or perhaps a post in a thread you are reading contains a link to another thread; if you casually hit that link, you are immersed in a different thread which might be one of "those" types.
If you're a hardnose like
RD.
then perhaps you can just shrug that off...but if you are a sensitive flower (like me
), it's a splash of cold water in the face.
S
SilverArowanaBoi
, sorry to see you go, but...how many times did you change your mind on your last tank set-up? Think twice...or more...before you make your Final Answer.
"Goodbye, cruel world!" posts are common online; I don't know why. Most of the time the poster pops up again a few days or weeks later as if nothing had happened. Usually, when a poster does indeed vanish for good, he/she posts a bit less for awhile, and then even less, and eventually stops altogether. Sometimes, another poster will ask about them later, and then people realize "Oh, yeah, whatever happened to What's-his-name? Haven't seen him around for awhile"
The internet is not real life; I don't think it's better to burn out rather than to fade away online. When you wake up one day and realize that you haven't posted or visited the XYZ forum for months, and haven't missed it...DELETE. There's no obligation to explain why you left, or even to make a conscious decision to leave. By the time you get to that point...you've already left, you just forgot to close the door on the way out.