Advertising bots

[Jamiet99uk]

The forum has recently been flooded with advertising bots posting links to various websites, mostly related to online gaming or betting.

Is there more we can do to block these accounts?

[Octavious]

If we go to the betting sites and, using our superior Diplomacy honed nous, clean them out, then they will stop asking us to go there.

[captainmeme]

Just got done with wielding the banhammer, they should all be gone now. Please DM me if I missed any.

I'm unfortunately the only person who deals with these and I'm not *technically* a full forum mod so I can't see the report page. I just look around for them when the waves come in.

[dargorygel]

Just got done with wielding the banhammer, they should all be gone now. Please DM me if I missed any.

I'm unfortunately the only person who deals with these and I'm not *technically* a full forum mod so I can't see the report page. I just look around for them when the waves come in.

Chopped liver here.

[kestasjk]

Just got done with wielding the banhammer, they should all be gone now. Please DM me if I missed any.

I'm unfortunately the only person who deals with these and I'm not *technically* a full forum mod so I can't see the report page. I just look around for them when the waves come in.

Your profile says you're a forum mod :| I checked darg and you and it looks the same, do you know what permissions youre missing?

[kestasjk]

Btw we've just replaced the captcha with ReCaptcha, so we now get a bot score from google when people sign up. At the moment it lets anyone who did a valid token auth through, but we'll see how that goes and possibly change the threshold. It's a tricky balance between not wanting to block any potential new users and not wanting to let bots in, hopefully this new function will help improve things.

At the same time I've seen worse forum spam, but maybe CM is just really on top of it and I'm not seeing it

[Jamiet99uk]

The new style of advertising bot is weird. It "replies" to forum topics in an AI-powered way which tries to pretend to be a real user commenting, and then slips in a hyperlink to whatever it's trying to promote.

[captainmeme]

Your profile says you're a forum mod :| I checked darg and you and it looks the same, do you know what permissions youre missing?

I'm not sure - I know I was only made a forum mod for specific subforums (might just be Tournaments). It seems like you may have fixed it because I can see the full mod control panel now, although I don't seem to have a link to it anywhere so I have to go in through a report.

At the same time I've seen worse forum spam, but maybe CM is just really on top of it and I'm not seeing it

You can see them in the mod logs; had 20+ yesterday all from different accounts. I've definitely seen worse but these are tougher to catch because (as Jamiet says) they post AI-generated stuff that vaguely lines up with the topic and hide an invisible link in it. I don't think the intention is even to get people to click the link - it's often completely unclickable - I think the intention is to get the name of whatever site they're advertising out on as many websites as possible so that it goes up in google search results.

[Jamiet99uk]

Here's a more traditional example that just appeared:

viewtopic.php?f=2&p=350939#p350939