Weird posts showing up in forum.

Why do I keep logging into the forum and seeing this (screenshot below)? I can come back a little later and it's back to normal. It has been doing this for the last couple of days, but I've never noticed it before.

Its just spam. Wait for mods to wake up.

Fair enough. On UK time so that makes sense.

They're probably korean spam bots, not sure what but they need to do something as they not only flood the recent posts with spam but old posts they bump. This hides all the actual recent posts from ths front page even after the spam is deleted.

Hopefully they can get some IP Blocks going or something. It's been going on for a few days now with a new user each time. It's making it almost impossible to browse the general forum. the_greg for now, you can just pick a specific forum you want to browse since it looks like the spam floods one particular game/section.

Couple suggestions

Time Limit between threads started by accounts under a certain lifespan, maybe a week or a month.

higher post count before starting a thread.

Thread review for new posters before it gets added to the site

I've seen those implemented to good effect on boards back in the day, not sure how much has changed since then though.

Glad I'm not the only to notice it. I would make jokes about some dude living in the North side of Korea but I think I'll let it pass.

Mods and Admins, get to work!

Rory mentioned on their Murder Island stream that the Korean bots run rampant during the night. So they are aware of it.

Yeah, engineers are working on tuning the spam detection. At the moment that means spam stays a little longer on the boards because we try not to manually delete stuff, but train the spam filter to figure things out and take care of it.

On that note, the spam bots are bumping a lot of old threads, so if you see something with the last post 6 years ago, please refrain from making any further posts in there, just let them drop back down to page 2.

Are these posts bumping old threads, then getting deleted as well? Most of the recently active threads are old?

@bunghole69: Yeah, there's an issue where even after the posts have been deleted the threads remain bumped, so there's a lot of 8 year old stuff on the first few pages of the forums right now.

It’s 11:20 in the UK and I’ve had to go to page 10 of the forums to actually get to new posts made by non-Korean spambots.

Hope it gets sorted soon, it’s making the forums unusable in Europe.

I thought new accounts couldn't post on the forums? Or is that the wiki?

It's a shame and a little annoying because active conversations are getting swamped whilst the dead ones are getting pulled back up to the top.

Yeah, a few mods outside of the US would maybe be appropriate until a technical solution can be found.

The mods and engineers agree that this sucks and is a big problem.

We're trying to stay on top of it and the engineers are working on improving automated detection and addressing issues like old threads staying bumped after the spam posts are deleted.

Maybe it's a difficult or time consuming feature to implement but couldn't you hellban / shadowban threads with korean letters by default?

@cliffordbanes: Trust us, if it seems like an obvious or extreme solution the developers have already thought of/tried it.

People keep saying "Get non-US moderators" but we have plenty of them. This is not somehow a moderation failure, it is an engineering problem. We could double the amount of moderators and still not have enough people even if they were all continually refreshing the forums looking for spam. Trust me everyone, if this was as easy as "Just get UK mods" the problem would have been solved years ago.