What Happened to the Forum Last Night?

[TylerSmith123]

The forum has just been flooded with dozens of new threads and ads, does anyone know why or what happened last night?

[Jesse Bischof]

I run a different message board (completely non-science related) and sometimes this stuff happens when new users get approved and they're spam bots. I've had it happen a few times on our board.

We'll need @admin or @tom jupille to clean it up.

[tom jupille]

I cleaned everything (and there was a LOT of it) out this morning and 8 hours later there is a lot more. It is a case of bots; each account generates anywhere from three to 65 spam posts in a few minutes. Complicating factor is is that there were 30+ bot accounts this (I haven't counted the current crop yet).

Our verification (the whole business with the value of pi) has remained quite robust for over a decade, but AI is with us. We're looking at the options.

For now flag at least one of these posts when you see them. My admin/mod function isn't a full-time job but I try to check in at least once a day.

[sbashkyrtsev]

If you need help moderating (deleting spam, fixing img BB-codes), I can help.

[DR]

I picked off one account this AM.

Pi-->captcha or something similar?

[TylerSmith123]

Thanks for your hard work Tom, and for letting us know about the particular difficulties of moderating a chat forum in the time of AI.

[per_oxid]

I cleaned everything (and there was a LOT of it) out this morning and 8 hours later there is a lot more. It is a case of bots; each account generates anywhere from three to 65 spam posts in a few minutes. Complicating factor is is that there were 30+ bot accounts this (I haven't counted the current crop yet).

Our verification (the whole business with the value of pi) has remained quite robust for over a decade, but AI is with us. We're looking at the options.

For now flag at least one of these posts when you see them. My admin/mod function isn't a full-time job but I try to check in at least once a day.

Thanks for running this site and giving good advice!