Spam issue

I've never experienced such a spam infestation of this kind before. If I was a suspicious person, I could almost imagine it being a deliberate attack from, for instance, a recently banned user.

Just turn off new user registrations for a few days. It will hardly be that much of an issue to new legitimate users, as long as a message informs them of the reason.

Looking at the posting frequency, it is automated, constantly 2 sets of 2 posts a minute, then a set of 3 posts a minute.

It looks like it is automated advertising for the developer/owner of the sites involved.

The head lines from the subject pop up in google too.

Its been spamming ubi, battle.net, and several others.

Yea, I know. It wasn't really a serious suggestion - just a mini bout of frustration :/

So I suppose it will have to wait till Tom gets back to resolve the issue.

In the mean time shall we name our new spam buddy? I vote for something simple like Carl. All in favor?

When the scirra office closes for the day the forum should change to a darker appearance with the message

"What a horrible night to have a curse..."

Bonus if they can get this music playing in the background.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7tNQXwjAlI0

Yeah, Carl sounds great. Why don't we try and monetize it? We could all band together and make a game, call it say, 'attack of the carls'.

In absolute seriousness now - just set the Newly Registered Users group to "Can ignore flood limit" - "Never".

Set flood limit to something like an hour.

Whaha, apparently, it's spamming the shiznit out of youtube too.

Scirra

After some research, it looks like this happened last February too on a global scale for a wide variety of forums.

I saw some reports of having success blocking this thing automatically by the use of Mollom.

https://www.mollom.com/

Apparently you can train this content monitoring program (by blocking things) to stop things like this from happening.

Here is a drupal related site thread with some information: https://www.drupal.org/node/2434091

Comment #13 looks promising

It appears the emails have finally stopped *touches wood*

This must be what we get for watching The Interview.

How about shadow banning these dummy accounts while purging all their messages in one go?

When you ban the user, does it ban the ip address too?

Maybe a good method of blocking future spam is to automatically prevent (or delete) a comment/topic/post which uses non-English characters, as we do not support other languages of discussion on this site anyway. The users probably shouldn't get banned for that though since sometimes it might be an accident, banning would be a step later after analyzing the post they had made for spam.

At least stop allowing url's in titles.

Thats just annoying in any language.

Scirra

Please close registration until this spamming stuff is sorted ....

There is a rapid decline in visitors, and it will not do the forum/site reputation any good.

This spam is making visiting here a lot less pleasant and t.b.h. it looks like crap and poor upkeep that it is allowed to go on for days without a simple temporary solution such as closing registration for a few days (with a notification informing them) until a more permanent fix is in place ....

You just need to fool the spammer into thinking what they're posting is going through so they keep using the same method.

looks like Korean

Korean, Japanese, Chinese, some Indonesian, banning these characters would do little, next you'll see spam in Tellugu and whatnot