Posted by: @pinback

Found this some what hilarious as a bot had attempted to post about sneeze guards, not once but twice. Can't for the life of me see the connection between SSC and a sneeze guard. 🤣 

Is it a space sneeze guard? 😜 

Posted by: @gaius-konstantine

Is it a space sneeze guard? 😜 

Or is it, in "space no one can hear you sneeze". 🤣 

I have seen a lot of funny spammer posts throughout the years and just wonder why here? I doubt highly your target audience is here haha, yeah I know the whole thing about SEO and the more links the more exposure.... but google now ranks the quality of the link (meaning are they indeed similar content to the linked site).

Maybe I should become a SSC spammer haha

I am just glad we haven't gotten any of the xxx spam that's plaguing some sites.

I used to like my registration question mod that was with an old SSC site we had.... that mod kept so many unwanted out 🙂 All I did was ask obvious scifi questions that any real fan of scifi would know and that prevented so many spammers from accessing the site. I haven't found another version of that mod unfortunately.

Posted by: @pinback

Found this some what hilarious as a bot had attempted to post about sneeze guards, not once but twice. Can't for the life of me see the connection between SSC and a sneeze guard.

But they should really try to market a sneeze cleaner for the inside of a space helmet then I think I would allow it 😉

Posted by: @sscadmin

I am just glad we haven't gotten any of the xxx spam that's plaguing some sites.

'Twas this type of spam which forced us (the Oolite forum) to enable first post approval. I've been around a bit, but as a Mod/Admin there, I've seen some stuff that shocked even me! There's been some comical stuff too - one memorable post simply said "Please delete me!"

The other one we seem to get a lot of are ones in foreign languages, which again make no sense. 🤣  

Posted by: @pinback

The other one we seem to get a lot of are ones in foreign languages

Yeah, we get plenty of those - Russian is popular. Lately, we're seeing an abundance of crawlers and scrapers. A certain The Knowledge AI has oodles of bots (as guests), as does AhrefsBot, all reporting back to somewhere - it verges on being malware, and can use a lot of bandwidth. If Oolite was an active forum, as it once was, it'd be a problem, but sadly we're pretty quiet these days.

Great one this morning entitled "let you know if your spouse is cheating on you". 🤣  

Seems we have a few bots floating around the station, post generic comments, easy to spot by the non specific comments and a link in the sig. 

Yep!

&ct=g

Started to delete some of these bot post and locking some threads, apologies' if I delete a genuine post. 

I noticed that these bot posts pop up more and more. Sometimes they seem to put in a user signature with an URL later, sometimes they sneak in URLs in replies. There's one awaiting for moderation here for example, having an url disgueised as a user mention "Solar".

I frequent the Pioneer subformum mostly, and I could lend a tiny hand in weeding them out there. Should I just delete them, or report them first?

Posted by: @nozmajner

I noticed that these bot posts pop up more and more. Sometimes they seem to put in a user signature with an URL later, sometimes they sneak in URLs in replies. There's one awaiting for moderation here for example, having an url disgueised as a user mention "Solar".

I frequent the Pioneer subformum mostly, and I could lend a tiny hand in weeding them out there. Should I just delete them, or report them first?

I would say just delete them nozmajner 👍 

Even got one them in this thread awaiting moderation, I know where that one is going. 

Okay, thanks! I'll squish them then as they crop up. Hurray for SEO crap.

Its always a struggle with these accounts that post .... I try to encourage posting so I don't restrict people. I can look into if I can prevent links in msgs or in footer. I just login and do my best to keep them at bay. For a while I tried adding usernames to the ban list, but they always create new account 😉 so my ban list is huge haha...

I been struggling on the research to leave this forum platform to something that has a bit more security or at a minimum the ability to stop the bots from registering.

UPDATE: I did restrict new users to post 5 posts before allowing file upload or links in messages, lets see if that helps. I will look into seeing if I can disable it in signatures if need be.

Haha, that’s hilarious! I’ve seen some pretty odd bot posts before, but sneezing and gaming? That’s a new one! I guess it’s just trying to connect random dots. I remember a time when I was at a gaming event and someone sneezed right in the middle of an intense match—talk about a distraction! It’s funny how things can get mixed up like that.

It was awful when I logged in there was over 171 posts I had to sift through from the last 9 days since my last login.... the Russian bots are hitting SSC hard (or least I think its Russsian ;))

Looks like they have a new tactic in not posting any links and just posing spam.

we do seem to get them waves from different parts of the world.

Yeah, I notice the links have gone down because I disable them. Its just a pain trying to clean this up all the time 🙂 I haven't had much time to examine the SQL for wpForo so I can try to convert it to another platform. Granted that may not solve this problem unless I can make creating accounts a challenge.... In the past website I had the ability to give a question during registration, which usually worked well. But prevented users from signing up because they were not able to answer the scifi question 😉