Spambot wave

Hi all,

We've been hit over the past few hours by a wave of spambots. They spammed random threads with the typical shady advertisements and also made similar threads of their own. Due to the volume of the posts, I chose to remove them rather than archive them, as the latter takes some more effort.

I removed 41 posts from 13 spam accounts. I've also banned 15 other suspicious accounts preemptively. I can't promise that we won't get spam today as I will be AFK, but I'll see what we can do later on.

Sadly they don't have any correlation in their names, email addresses or IP addresses, so I can't even temporarily ban a wide group of users.

Thanks to the few users who reported nine posts in total. I greatly appreciate it. To the others: don't hesitate to use the "report this post" button!

Will keep an eye on it for you today MrB.

By the way, I think it could help to delete the spam users completely and not just move them into the spambot group. Not unless this means they become invisible to an automated process that might check which sites delete spammers and which don't. It's a money and resource thing for spammers too, so (mostly) they do seem to check which sites are 'worth it' to spam. At least in my experience. I have seen this on some Wordpress sites, deleting the users will decrease new spammers over time. Until a new 'business' starts up and finds you, of course

And now here is my sig

PinkRobot, I'm mainly not removing them because I can't revert it and it's a trivial task to do anyway. I'll discuss this with a few people.

Well it's only based on my personal observations anyway and those could definitely be wrong. So yes, discuss

huttys report-button score on this wave :: 4

(at least I think it was 4)

::reloads Rifle, charges nex, smiles in an evil way::

Ok, the hunt begins!)

I have a question: When you click report button, is somthing supposed to happen? I mean, should a window pop up, or somthing else like that? Or is it enought to click it just once, and then it is fully reported?

A window will open where you can supply a reason. It might be blocked by a popup blocker that you are using.