As usual I'm a couple of months late to effectively warn people about this, but as I've now twice been the victim of it and it seems to be becoming more prevalent, I thought that people might like to get some sort of advance information in case it starts happening to them. The first time it happened I thought it was just a random user messaging me, but the second time made me look into it further.

There's a new Internet curiosity that's been around since about March which I've mentally taken to calling "Salmoning", after the variety of the strain that got me. It isn't a virus or a spambot, and it doesn't phish (despite the name) for any information other than what you already have online. Unfortunately it isn't something that you can really guard against, either. The best way to describe it is probably as some sort of malicious social experiment. It targets people on a number of journal sites who have their AIM account name available, and connects them together without them immediately knowing. Its original name was "thegreathatsby", but a related or copycat movement has recently sprung up using salmon-related names, which is where the name I used comes from. The photo on the left is a hastily-drawn whiteboard explanation of it that I gave to Whitney, and only succeeded in making her head spin round.

As you can tell it is impossible to tell from the diagram, the Salmon acts as a middleman between two users who don't know that they're talking to each other. Somehow, it detects when two people with available AIM information post to their journals at roughly the same time (the time span is as yet unknown), and then sends each of them a possibly conversation-inspiring but ultimately meaningless message. I have so far received "I'm being a walrus!" (to which I unfortunately replied "/me polishes you") and "Don't be true to a heart that's cruel".

Each user sees the message as coming from the Salmon's name (always ending in Salmon, Hat or Taco - for example DroopySalmon and SandWornSalmon are the ones that got me). Now comes the clever bit... if either of those users then sends a message back to the Salmon, it will be forwarded on to the other user under the Salmon's name. In effect, the two victims talk to each other, while each of them thinks they're talking to this mysterious "Salmon" user who messaged them out of nowhere.

Apparently the Salmon will sometimes have an operator lurking behind it and watching the conversation, but it's impossible to tell for sure. Whichever way, the Salmon is also capable of manipulating the messages that the victims send. Most of this is through simple word replacement - for example, most of the time your own username will be translated to the Salmon's name, and several other links or words that might explain the subterfuge are doctored so that the game isn't given away. On a more unusual level, sometimes your speech will be run through a translator to make you type like a moron or a pirate (though your original messages are still shown to you, so that you're unaware of this).

The effect is usually one of rather hopeless confusion, and before finding out the explanation yesterday I unfortunately may have confused or traumatized someone who I thought was a rather badly-acted chatbot. If your AIM information is available on your journal, there doesn't seem much you can do about this short of taking it down - occasionally you'll effectively be messaged by a random user from anywhere in the world. But who knows - you might even meet someone interesting.

It's also explained rather better here - the community has a list of known bot names in its user information.