BHW feels too unnatural nowadays, do you notice that too?

A forum is by definition "a public meeting or lecture involving audience discussion".
When I open a thread on a forum, I expect an audience to answer me and discuss about a topic.
What I do not expect is a huge crowd of bots recycling the same phrases and knowledge over and over and over and over.

BHW felt way more useful ages ago, when I was just a lurker. Now it's just flooded by people from poor countries dropping some questions to ChatGPT and pasting the answers in the thread. All my respect for the hustlers but, If I wanted an AI to answer me, I would've asked directly to ChatGPT. If I ask something here, it is because I want to confront real people with real experiences. This is kind of happening on Reddit too, but here it is way more noticeable, especially because most of the people here want to SELL something, and in order to do it, they have to look respectable and experienced. Most of the times, when you make a particularly in-depth WTB thread, you get flooded by irrelevant answers. They don't even read the thread manually. Look at the guy that wanted Backlinks for Yugoslavia & USSR, and got 3 pages full of replies, LOL.

Will this issue ever be addressed? I only saw Staff members saying that people use AI to paraphrase their sentences, so it also has a legit use-case. And a crappy AI detection system that flags a simple, non-advertising comment I made, even though I manually wrote everything inside the comment box, no pasting and no AI involved. To be fair, actual AIs usually escape this detection system...

there is still value and knowledgeable people here, you just need to navigate trough all the ai slop

TheReviewer said:

there is still value and knowledgeable people here, you just need to navigate trough all the ai slop

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Yes indeed, but you know, filtering all that slop manually hurts my brain...

I remember it was before more journeys and peoples who share their experience and methods but i see it now are less and less such threads but more marketplace sale thread are bumped on first page. With all this AI less and less methods i see being shared that is a big disapoint

Yeah, pretty much every section is now a car crash, really frustrating.

A 5 page thread will typically have no more than 4 or 5 replies that add any value whatsoever.

"AI is not on it's own a breach of forum rules" is ridiculous, but hey ho. Join the BHW community... with a heavy dose of AI.

The repetitive replies by new members rewording previous responses to boost post count could be eradicated immediately by limiting new users for X period of time to a maximum of X posts per day/week in the Xenforo backend, but again, nope.

Don't even get me started on the fact that I myself have had 3 or 4 instances this week of "Suspected AI" tag on my own posts because I appreciate a semi colon every now and again - yet the barrage of garbage replies being posted multiple times every minute are not even being picked up. It does not work.

Go figure.

Why “poor countries”? What exactly are you trying to discriminate against?

Maybe the forum owners need to remove the post requirements they put in place for newly created accounts and find other ways to curb spam-scam activity. If you check well, the bot-like comments are coming mostly from new accounts trying hard to get past the post requirements so they can be able to send DMs and access restricted forum sections.

TrustMarket said:

Why “poor countries”? What exactly are you trying to discriminate against?

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Why are you pretending I wrote something racist? Did I ever discriminate anyone? I even tried using a wording that wouldn't offend anyone, but there is always someone ready to get offended.

I said "poor countries" because lots of people see making a SEO agency as a fast and working way to make some bucks in a market where people are willing to pay big amounts of money for jobs that mostly involve manual work (guest posts is one example, because usually it is just manual outreach to publishers, unless you use a directory). Poor countries have lots of people seeking for remote jobs like this, that do not need a degree or a bachelor or whatever it is. And poor countries are highly populated. This explains why most of the SEO agencies come from the same place. And they also are, most of the times but not always, the ones not reading post requirements, using AI and posting about non-relevant stuff, etc... because of the high "speed-based" competition they have. The first one to get noticed by the Thread Starter, in the most convincing way, is the winner, usually.

This is not discrimination, it is a mere fact. If something, I wanted to denounce how this type of competition can lead to a quality decrease. But that has nothing to do with a certain country or with racism. It does not mean that people from richer countries always pay more attention or that they surely have greater quality in what they offer.

Most of them are not even people, they are bots. Many of my comments with grammar mistakes were filtered as AI while bots using long dashes and paraphrasing previous comments are bypassing the system. It seems like AI filter will only make things worse.

serpsystems said:

Why are you pretending I wrote something racist? Did I ever discriminate anyone? I even tried using a wording that wouldn't offend anyone, but there is always someone ready to get offended.

I said "poor countries" because lots of people see making a SEO agency as a fast and working way to make some bucks in a market where people are willing to pay big amounts of money for jobs that mostly involve manual work (guest posts is one example, because usually it is just manual outreach to publishers, unless you use a directory). Poor countries have lots of people seeking for remote jobs like this, that do not need a degree or a bachelor or whatever it is. And poor countries are highly populated. This explains why most of the SEO agencies come from the same place. And they also are, most of the times but not always, the ones not reading post requirements, using AI and posting about non-relevant stuff, etc... because of the high "speed-based" competition they have. The first one to get noticed by the Thread Starter, in the most convincing way, is the winner, usually.

This is not discrimination, it is a mere fact. If something, I wanted to denounce how this type of competition can lead to a quality decrease. But that has nothing to do with a certain country or with racism. It does not mean that people from richer countries always pay more attention or that they surely have greater quality in what they offer.

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You can make your point without calling countries "Poor". It comes across as unnecessary. and if you really didn't mean anything offensive then there were no reason to edit the post afterword. the problem isn't discussing competition and quality, it's the way you framed entire country just to make your argument sound stronger.

ShirleyJohnsson said:

You can make your point without calling countries "Poor". It comes across as unnecessary. and if you really didn't mean anything offensive then there were no reason to edit the post afterword. the problem isn't discussing competition and quality, it's the way you framed entire country just to make your argument sound stronger.

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I didn't even name a country if that's the problem. I said poor countries in general. That's the reality, poor countries, and I explained why this happens less in other countries.
I get that it could have sounded offensive if I framed a single country, but I didn't do that.

Also, that's not the point of the discussion!

The wording matters. It immediately shifts the discussion from SEO quality to people and regions.

ShirleyJohnsson said:

The wording matters. It immediately shifts the discussion from SEO quality to people and regions.

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I literally just said "poor countries". No specific country named. No need to make a drama out of this.

The irony is hard to miss: a forum about blackhat tactics is now struggling with people using... blackhat tactics on the forum itself.

The post-count gating system made sense when the forum was smaller and moderators could verify quality manually. Now it's just an incentive structure that rewards volume over value. People learn the rules and game them — that's exactly the mindset BHW attracts.

The AI detection problem is a separate but related issue. The platform's classifier flags semicolons and clean grammar while missing obvious GPT boilerplate. That's a training data problem, not a moderation effort problem.

What actually degrades the forum isn't AI per se — it's low-stakes posting. When someone has nothing to lose by leaving a worthless reply, they will. The solution isn't stricter AI filters, it's raising the cost of bad contributions: reputation systems that actually gate access, not just post counts.

That said, the quality threads are still here. They're just harder to find now.

im new here and this is really the first thing I noticed. some topics feel synthetic like cheap ai agents are just chatting amongst themselves. but im sure the stuff care about this more than we do

We're closing this thread. Not because we're closing down discussion on this subject, but because there are other topics on this subject where it is being discussed. Also, this thread isn't relevant to this section and it's fostering arguments between members.

And, yet again, we ask you to report it when we see it and we also say that we work on this more than anything else we work on.