Several times per day, a new account gets created and posts a variation of this post. Sometimes in Russian. "Where are the admins? I want to talk about advertising. It's important!" And so on. We have mostly just removed them, as with all spam, but this one had been quite persistent, rolling IPs and browsers and so on, posting and posting. After a while we tried responding, but it became clear that there was not a human at the tiller--actually saying "yes this is the admin" did not generate any results.
Actually approving this post may have been the thing that broke the bot's loop, as after it was approved, an actual spam post got made (advertising a Russian sex chat site), which I removed, and so far we've not received further spam of this variety. Time will tell. We do deal with a fair bit of spam, but nothing quite so automated and persistent before this.
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Notes -
3 more posts, all on separate accounts. We really can't figure out how this is supposed to work.
Can you IP ban people? I assume that the functionality must exist somewhere, at least. It's not perfect but it's better than nothing.
I think there is some sort of functionality for that. But switching IPs is relatively easy in this day and age.
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please do the needful and redeem
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hey its me ur brother
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Yes hello, it's me Jamal!
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I am Administrator themotte.org
I am Spartacus!
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Separate but closely related question, does anyone have ideas for dealing with a persistent spam account?
Ask them a question only a real The Motte user would know?
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Не знаю, но он определенно не внушает мне симпатии.
No emojis. Three day ban.
I'm not sure I understand what's going on here. Why the presumably-fake mod posts?
Several times per day, a new account gets created and posts a variation of this post. Sometimes in Russian. "Where are the admins? I want to talk about advertising. It's important!" And so on. We have mostly just removed them, as with all spam, but this one had been quite persistent, rolling IPs and browsers and so on, posting and posting. After a while we tried responding, but it became clear that there was not a human at the tiller--actually saying "yes this is the admin" did not generate any results.
Actually approving this post may have been the thing that broke the bot's loop, as after it was approved, an actual spam post got made (advertising a Russian sex chat site), which I removed, and so far we've not received further spam of this variety. Time will tell. We do deal with a fair bit of spam, but nothing quite so automated and persistent before this.
Ah no, sadly I removed some of the standard spam posts yesterday.
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You know better than this. Jail! Jail!
We found a witch. May we ban him?
How do you know that he is a witch?
He turned me into a newt!
...a newt?
I got better.
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The levitating. The evil book reading. Them cream cookies he's always eating. He's a damn witch!
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Ban him! Ban him!
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Wow, using foreign alphabets really crosses a line, you should ban that guy.
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Ah, the duality of man.
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