OK someone tell me what a spambot is ?
A computer program that automatically registers itself on forums or blogs and posts spam. This one was particularly clever, because the message body was somewhat on-topic, and the spam link was in its signature
These programs are the reason websites show those annoying pictures of distorted letters and numbers that you have to enter in a box. That’s a type of Turing Test (called CAPTCHA) which is supposed to tell humans apart from computer programs. It’s easy for us to pick out the symbols in those pictures, but difficult for computer programs. There is a constant battle between websites (like Google and Yahoo) and the people who write the spam software. When the CAPTCHA is broken the website has to modify the algorithm they use to produce the images, to make them harder for computer programs to interpret (which also usually makes them harder for people to read as well).