Spam attacks on this forum

Community
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Currently we are starting to get a new kind of attack from spambots (or spam posting humans).

The spammer creates a new account, then copy-pastes a programming question from Reddit r/Processing.

They then return many hours or days later and edit ad links or malware links into their original posts.

Our spam filters aren’t catching this – and of course we aren’t either, responding to these (legitimate) reddit questions with full answers. I’m opening this community thread to let people know, and also take suggestions.

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I’m now also moving some comments and discussions from spam examples into this thread. They link back to spambot examples (until they are removed).

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spambot post (this spambot already flagged by another post), looks like from reddit

https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+"i+write+a+lot+of+letters+and+e-mails"

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Another reddit copying spambot

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Another spambot copying from Reddit:

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Well, it looks like @anon43149899 is another spambot, like @LennoxConner – mirroring legitimate reddit questions for us to answer:

https://www.reddit.com/r/processing/comments/e96y3w/confused_what_can_i_do_after_learning_processing/

…and then injecting random malware spam later:

Understanding these concepts is key - they translate eas
https: //getappvalley.com/ [https: //vlc.onl](https: //vlc.onl/) ily to any other programming language you may use later.

I’m temporarily leaving these up so we can look at them / talk about it. If I delete the user it will also delete all their posts, removing all the answers.

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Well, this is a real bummer. Looks like the @LennoxConner account copies reddit posts from the Processing reddit channel,

…then waits a while before injecting them with random spam.

It did it twice, and since they were (copies of) legitimate user questions, we answered them.

https://discourse.processing.org/t/what-coding-language-do-i-need-to-learn-to-accomplish-this-specific-task-word-processing/20073

Then it vandalized them with spam later.

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@GoToLoop – are you still an active r/processing reddit user, and have you seen things like this before?

I am trying to think about a quick way to screen for these things. @Kevin sometimes signals when a person has cross-posted from StackOverflow without cross-linking – I’m assuming that is periodic manual checking – but this is automated and involves malware, not bad manners.

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Yup, I check on Reddit - Dive into anything daily, but seldom reply to anything there.

When I spot an obvious cross-post, I usually post a link to each other.

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Would it be possible to prevent external links in posts until you get a certain badge? Then it might require too much effort for spammers to persist.

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Yeah, this is just me manually noticing the same post in multiple places.

I know admins can ban a user’s IP address, would that help at all here?

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I’ve gone ahead and marked all posts as spam to help train, then banned and banned the IPs on the accounts – but we just got some more new accounts with reddit-copy first posts. Right now the ability of new users to first-post without moderation (usually) and to post a link (to a p5 sketch, or github, or an arduino peripheral etc.) really helps people. I really hope we don’t have to shut that down. We’ll keep an eye on it.

Many of the spam links were odd – like .onl or .ooo, not .com – so they should be easy to train on.

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a crawler could collect all links in the forum (in a hashMap).

  • all links up to today are marked as okay
  • a new link is checked against the old links
  • if it’s new, it shows them in an extra list
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Does the spam appear in all categories or just in Processing?

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Multiple categories so far – processing code, project guidance, libraries. although some might be being moved into those categories by mods.