Today Spam Attack! (new registrations might be affected)

Yup, that was a big 'ol attack of robot spam, folks. Massive, is the term that Forest is using.

And gee, thanks to AI, for making it possible for the scammers to create over 400(!) new user accounts in less than 24 hours, so that each account could create a mere dozen or fewer unique posts, taking up pages and pages of individual unique threads. The General Discussion subforum received most of the posts, which added up to over 2000.

We had a small attack about 24 hours prior (Monday night in my Pacific/US West Coast time zone) which was easily managed, but that didn't discourage the launching of the major onslaught that started last night.

New registrations may be blocked for a while as Forest works on a defense. This kind of thing happens to forums fairly regularly. Ironically, staying ahead of the scammers is very much like the whack-a-mole that we play with TMS symptoms, am I right?

For anyone who registered yesterday or this morning (still referring to the US Pacific time zone): It wasn't hard to deactivate the 400+ new accounts all at once to prevent further damage, but I couldn't click through on the details of 400 registrations in order to review the brief introduction that we ask for (scammers have junk intros). All I could do was skim and sample a few usernames that looked less scammy than most. Doing this I found one user who was legit. We don't typically get more than one or two new users per day on average - but it's possible that that I missed someone else who was inadvertently banned, for which I apologize and ask that you try again. Although when you should try again is still up in the air, per the previous paragraph!

I'm going to go take a break now. More later, presumably.

 

Thank you, @JanAtheCPA for your hard work of going through all of the spam threads to delete them. I sat down to work on getting the last ones and was impressed to see them all gone! I did gather some additional data that we can use to make our defenses more robust, though, and am looking forward to applying it over the next week or so. The key thing is to ensure that the spammers don't get anything by attacking us. If we ensure that they don't make money when they attack our site, then eventually they will move on.