i call them "fakebots"
 

those you use yahoo's chat and ICQ know of "spambots"... programs designed to advertise stuff. lately, they've gotten pretty good, including interacting with the user before hammering them with a link so we can see them shove odd objects into their privates.

now i see this kind of automation on limewire. everytime without fail, i've seen at least 4 "servers" with the supposed file i'm looking for. sometimes i'll see this number go as high as 32. my suspicions were answered when i started searching for things i knew couldn't exist, like my phone number, the ISBN on a book, and my URL. all were found on limewire (my URL brought up 32 files). i specifically see the format... the filename is the same as the query, except instead of spaces there's an underscore. usually, half the found files start with "!!__YEEHAA__!!".

this is getting bloody annoying. didn't the older versions of limewire show the IPs of the computer we were downloading from (not in the "downloading" window, but in the "results" window)? and didn't it have the option of filtering out or banning user-added IPs?

c'mon, we gotta nip this in the bud. i'll connect and wait 5-10 minutes to reach a total of 500 GB of files to search. i don't want to think half of those files are fake.

Limewire still shows the source of the file... it may be turned off in your system.

Since you did not indicate what platform you are on I will assume it is windows... right click on the 'header' of the search window and a drop down list will appear... be sure the 'location' check box is checked... this is the source IP.

Go to tools / Options / filters / hosts and add the offending IP to the list marked 'filter hosts'. Done.