That was quite the dumptruck.

[azurelunatic]

Hi everybody!

I just wanted to mention that we did just get a *ton* of spam.

The two most active themes in the spam I've seen over the past week or so (though I have been afk at work quite a bit) have been:

This dumptruck-load just now: a dodgy-looking link, and text that looks like it's from real people talking about pornography, some of which pornography would not be legal in the US.

A longer-lasting and somewhat friendlier campaign, rife with misspellings and alphabet-soup unique keys, with text that has in some cases been copied from comments left by or about people I actually know, with a theme of programmer culture and web development.

Please continue to delete-as-spam any spam that you can, as while a lot of the spam will be from spammers who have already been squished, some of them may be from unique sources.

Comments

[yvi]

What's the current status? I am getting what feels like a metric shitton of spam on fandom20in20 - just came back from a few days of sickness and my GMail inbox was filled with it.

[azurelunatic]

It's still going on, but they do not appear to be doing anything particularly *creative* to evade the usual antispam measures, just doing their thing at a very high volume and from a lot of sources.

[jjhunter]

Hi!

Just wanted you to have a heads up that we seem to be in the middle of an anonymous comment spam attack at poetree; I'm deleting them as spam as they come in, but my lunch break is ending now and I can't really be spending time at work moderating the comm for the next hour or so until the attack ends. Any chance someone could temporarily track all the comments at the comm for a few hours and wham! 'em with a magic anti-spam hammer? I've done 3 in the last 20 minutes.

[denise]

Unfortunately, the antispam team can't do anything until something gets put into the antispam system. The best thing to do if you've become the temporary dumptruck target is to turn off anonymous comments, or screen them automatically + require a captcha for them. That way they won't be visible until you can get to delete them.

[jjhunter]

Thanks. I did exactly the latter once we hit 17 of the little gadflies, and it seems to have done the trick.

Here's what melannen said when I posted about the attack on my personal journal later yesterday:

Your friendly local person-with-basic-antispam-privs here! :D (I would have to be more active to feel right calling myself an active team member, but I do occasionally rouse myself to play whack-a-mole.)

Anyway, I went through and banned all your spammers, but they seemed to be from a bunch of different IPs, so unfortunately, that's probably not going to stop them immediately, but there's not much else we can do. Delete+report as spam, letting the membership know, and screening/CAPTCHAing anon comments temporarily was the right thing to do .

Usually, spam like that comes in waves - what they're doing is testing to see if spam they post sticks around (the keysmash subject lines are so they can easily google for it later.) If it all gets whacked fairly quickly, and they find they can no longer spam, usually they will give up and move on within a few days.

ETA: If you would like to be able to whack your own spam, by the way, joining the team is neither difficult nor high-effort! Here is pretty much all you need to know

<3

[skywaterblue]

Just deleted a dumptruck full of spampurse ads.

[azurelunatic]

Awesome, thanks! I'm not seeing them in the spam reports; if you check the "report as spam" checkbox when deleting, we can whack them so it's harder for the same offender to strike again.

[skywaterblue]

Whoops. I deleted from my DW inbox and didn't see a report as spam box, otherwise I would have done! If they come back I will try to find it.

[azurelunatic]

May I ask the method you used when deleting? There should be a prompt to delete as spam when deleting the comment, though deleting the notification will not prompt and will leave the comments in place.