SPAM is growing up in this forum. Sign-up process is too easy now. Can it be fixed or I must deal with spam filters in my Inbox?
1 Like
Hopefully the Best Practical admins will deal with it soon. I’ve flagged so many spam posts this morning that the RT forum software won’t let me flag any more! 
As you noticed, we got hit by a small spam storm over the weekend. Thanks to @GreenJimll for trying to flag as much as possible.
I think I have cleared most of the spam posts from the weekend, but we’ll keep looking.
We also enabled some additional spam checking via a plugin. In the past the Discourse settings were enough, but obviously some spammers found us and were able to get through. I believe these are mostly humans at this point and not automation, so it makes blocking automatically more challenging.
Following up on this, we are watching all new accounts closely and being careful about what we approve. Based on what we see, it seems a new batch of AI-powered forum spammers have found us and are trying to create new accounts. To get around the new rules, they are trying to reply enough to get to the trust level that allows them to spam again.
The new AI responses are pretty good and can be hard to distinguish from real people. We think we can still tell and are defaulting to blocking these accounts. If anyone legitimate tries to create an account and gets blocked, let us know and we’ll take a look. Also, if you see posts, especially from new users, that seem like AI spam, don’t hesitate to flag them as spam and we’ll take a look.
1 Like