When I was an admin on a site years ago, IPs were our first line of defense. It was a tough tool; in a city, it would be entirely possible to inadvertently block non-offending users. VPN usage was basically nonexistent.
I’m usually on a VPN, just in case you were curious 
There are several things I cannot do if I’m using it. Annoying, but I get it.
Bump.
I noticed one the other day but forgot to mark it.
I believe they (I guess there were two) have been removed in the meantime.
Slop is a newish term to describe low-grade AI content, according to this article in The New York Times. (gift link)
First there was e-mail spam and now there is AI slop. Yikes.
Yes. And some of the AI slop will talk back to you.
At least they’re very polite in general 
We need to find some pigs who will eat the slop.
AI bots were often using forums - on any topic - as a ‘training ground’
fortunately, most forum staff caught on quick and banned them.
there are still some relatively inactive places that are populated by AI-bots talking to AI-bots.
some of it gets pretty funny.
They already produce it …
Saw that in a forum mirror (*) (a member made a “.net” copy of a “.com” forum which had a lot of software issues that the admin didn’t have the time/energy to fix, thus a lot of downs). Once the original forum got a new admin the forum was again pretty stable, and everyone stopped visiting the .net mirror, including the member who’d originally set it up.
About a year later I clicked the wrong link and went there by accident. It had something like 30K spam and bot accts, all yammering at each other across the threads.
(*) Don’t know if I’m using the right terminology, but he basically copied all the active threads into his new .net domain.
oh yeah. fret not the terminology - most everyone recognizes the issue…
I’ve seen bots post 200 messages in the space of one minute!
