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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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.
Thank you for the explanation, I was extremely confused by what was going on here.
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Ah no, sadly I removed some of the standard spam posts yesterday.
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