4 hours ago, TheVat said:

Could there be a slightly more challenging registration test? Questions that weed out more bots and still let people from various cultures and education levels in?

I don’t have any insight into that. I know the CAPTCHA was upgraded, but there are sites out there selling ways to defeat the safeguards.

My estimation is that the filter caught 3/4 of the spammers but only half of the spam posts. Spammers that filled up their 5 post limit used different formats and the filter would only flag some of them. I’m guessing they are doing that to increase the odds that something gets through.

If the algorithm is learning what counts as spam then it should become more efficient

Looks like a giant clog of spams in Science News, all around 7-9 hours ago. If that's helpful.

Hard to imagine these airlines, which most of the spams are, would really want to be associated with ad campaigns that border on DDOS attacks.

Edited September 26Sep 26 by TheVat

Question for an administrator or moderator; Is it better for you if we flag as many as possible or just one or two?

16 minutes ago, npts2020 said:

Question for an administrator or moderator; Is it better for you if we flag as many as possible or just one or two?

Generally one per spammer is enough to bring it to our attention, though at this juncture there are so many, going through new posts has a similar impact.

7 minutes ago, npts2020 said:

Question for an administrator or moderator; Is it better for you if we flag as many as possible or just one or two?

With these floods, all we need is a heads up that we're being attacked. Once we deal with shutting down the open threads through spambanning, we can gatekeep new member registrations. What a pain!

These attacks have no links, so a lot are getting through. Not sure how effective the phone number scams are, seems like such a long shot on a site like this.

3 hours ago, TheVat said:

Looks like a giant clog of spams in Science News, all around 7-9 hours ago. If that's helpful.

Hard to imagine these airlines, which most of the spams are, would really want to be associated with ad campaigns that border on DDOS attacks.

Indeed. Feels like DDOS to me. Taking trolling to the next level?

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

Indeed. Feels like DDOS to me. Taking trolling to the next level?

Why should anyone dislike this place enough to pull off a DDoS on it?

Like, it's a rather obscure forum with several dozen active members.

Edited September 26Sep 26 by Otto Kretschmer

4 hours ago, CharonY said:

Generally one per spammer is enough to bring it to our attention, though at this juncture there are so many, going through new posts has a similar impact.

I would add that if you ones a little down in the queue, after we’ve spam-banned, report.

We still see the hidden posts for a while, so “recent posts” still shows us all the spam, and we might miss something buried on page 4 or 5

1 hour ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

Why should anyone dislike this place enough to pull off a DDoS on it?

Like, it's a rather obscure forum with several dozen active members.

I don’t think it’s that. I still think it’s getting as many pages to show fraudulent phone numbers for the scammers so that searches (especially the AI summary) point to them, so they can fool you into calling them and giving up credit card and/or account info.

Because they tried different formatting tactics, I think it means they know not all the posts will appear, owing to spam filters. I also think they’re counting on many target sites being unmoderated

14 hours ago, pinball1970 said:

never seen a spam flood this bad.

AI makes it easier for more people, a double whammy in terms of adding slop and noise in a world where bad actors each day use ever improving tools to amplify specific parts of it for personal gain.

6 hours ago, npts2020 said:

Question for an administrator or moderator; Is it better for you if we flag as many as possible or just one or two?

6 hours ago, CharonY said:

Generally one per spammer is enough to bring it to our attention

Multiple platforms offer admins a config setting to enable auto-ban/suspension of accounts and/or threads once a certain threshold gets crossed and a specific number of reports (say 2 or 3) have come in from other members.

Perhaps that is what npts had in mind when asking, curious if that’s possible here. A question for Cap’n, I know.

ETA: It wouldn’t surprise me if engineers were using sites like these to test and train their agents, or even AI coding agents already coding bits and agents of their own and sending them to fora and Reddit and such

Edited September 27Sep 27 by iNow

9 hours ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

Why should anyone dislike this place enough to pull off a DDoS on it?

Like, it's a rather obscure forum with several dozen active members.

Yes, on further study of the phone numbers on the Homework Help section I think @swansont may be right. All of them seem to include a phone number and it is noticeable the same small subset of numbers is repeated in connection with range of unrelated services, e.g. several different airlines and then, incongruously, bitdefender. I thought of DDOS because of the mass dumping of spam in such a short space of time, but I suppose that could be a tactic to get loads of references onto the website and read by AI systems, before the website guardians realise and put a stop to it.

But to your question, from reading a bit about this it seems some warped individuals do sometimes mount DDOS attacks on the sites of organisations they have had a bad experience with, or even just at random for shits and giggles: hypertrolling in effect.

Spam again this morning, hopefully not in the numbers seen yesterday.

See it, report it!

The simplest solution would be to make reading of posts available to everyone, but posting is only available after petitioning the Admins to become a member. I would think controlling who can post is a lot easier than cleaning up so many spam posts ( thank you BTW ).

Or is this too similar to Trumpian anti-immigrant sentiment ( I'm here, and I don't want anyone else to come in )

Edited September 27Sep 27 by MigL

@MigL it doesn't seem Trumpian if everyone registering has the same hurdles to join and the hurdles pose no serious obstacle to a legitimate person. As I said earlier, maybe the registration form could be bolstered: have a couple questions which require reading comprehension one would need for actual participation on such a website and would require changing information on a daily basis so that spammers couldn't share prepackaged answers. Or, as you said, require review by a moderator before account activation. Also, and I don't know how workable any of this is, but require all answers to be done by keystrokes and not pasting. In fact - brain fart! - maybe require the first five newbie posts be typed in, nothing pasted.

I wasn't even thinking about questions.

If you want to become a posting member, you fill out your information as you normally would, but then have to wait until an Admin emails you the go-ahead to start posting.

I don't think bots would put up with the delay, and it would certainly deter automated mass spamming.

16 minutes ago, MigL said:

I wasn't even thinking about questions.

If you want to become a posting member, you fill out your information as you normally would, but then have to wait until an Admin emails you the go-ahead to start posting.

I don't think bots would put up with the delay, and it would certainly deter automated mass spamming.

Yes I also wondered about this. I suppose the downsides are another - and time-sensitive - task for administrators, plus a higher hurdle to join, which might put off the casual newbies that a site like this may feel it needs to attract to remain vibrant.

Short of that I would think a kill switch that temporarily prevents any new joiners, which could be deployed for say 24-48hrs when a spam attack starts, might help.

It's happening again.

One post is not a flood. It wasn’t the same type. And the system flagged it, though I had assumed flagged posts were hidden until approved (they are displayed with a pinkish background, just like hidden posts are)

3 hours ago, swansont said:

One post is not a flood. It wasn’t the same type. And the system flagged it, though I had assumed flagged posts were hidden until approved (they are displayed with a pinkish background, just like hidden posts are)

They really should be hidden if flagged. I'd assumed they were as well. Why require staff approval if the post can already be seen?

I sometimes see posts on the Home page, but when I click on them, I'm told I don't have permission to view them.

9 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

They really should be hidden if flagged. I'd assumed they were as well. Why require staff approval if the post can already be seen?

I assumed so, but it was the only spam post that showed up, so if Otto could see it…

12 minutes ago, KJW said:

I sometimes see posts on the Home page, but when I click on them, I'm told I don't have permission to view them.

Wow. That seems like the worst way to implement the protocol. Unfortunately we can only do what the software allows.

Occasionally I wish I had a non-moderator account so I could see what regular members see.

19 minutes ago, KJW said:

I sometimes see posts on the Home page, but when I click on them, I'm told I don't have permission to view them.

Yes I've seen that as well.

Also I've seen posts that I watched being posted, listed as posted 5 hours ago.

Also I find the All Activity doesn't keep up with posters - It can take several minutes and sometimes clicking round the site for them to be added to the list.

36 minutes ago, KJW said:

I sometimes see posts on the Home page, but when I click on them, I'm told I don't have permission to view them.

The currently still visible “Kraken” spam post in the Maths section is a case in point. For some odd reason it’s still there after the cleanup, but one does not have permission to view it. Weird.

8 minutes ago, exchemist said:

The currently still visible “Kraken” spam post in the Maths section is a case in point. For some odd reason it’s still there after the cleanup, but one does not have permission to view it. Weird.

That topic is on the Home page and the Mathematics page, but not on the Analysis and Calculus page (where it is directed on the Mathematics page).

15 minutes ago, KJW said:

That topic is on the Home page and the Mathematics page, but not on the Analysis and Calculus page (where it is directed on the Mathematics page).

Maybe the post itself has gone but not the title, for some reason.

1 minute ago, exchemist said:

Maybe the post itself has gone but not the title, for some reason.

I assume the post is hidden rather than deleted. The error message speaks of permission, not topic not found. On another forum I visit, one can do a search for something in a hidden post, have the search result display with a link to the hidden post, but the post itself be denied due to lack of permission.