We are under attack!

[Wei Ji the Learner]

Repel spammers! Repel Spammers! This is NOT A DRILL!

[Erik Keith]

Came for a flip-mat PDF, stayed for the purging.
They've been pretty relentless recently, looks like they've broken through the first line.

[Steve Geddes]

Thanks, Erik. After hours banhammering is greatly appreciated on the other side of the world. :)

[Wei Ji the Learner]

It is only through the diligent detail work of hard working netizens such as yourself, Erik, that Paizo remains an open, safe, and welcoming community.

*SALUTE*

[GM Aram Zey]

And now they're back.

[Sethvir]

Busy flagging them as spam as I see them right now.

[UnArcaneElection]

They're really hitting in force tonight.

[In character Vidmaster7]

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight them on the general discussion forum, we shall fight on the thread and comment boards, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our website, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the product discussion, we shall fight on for the community, we shall fight on for the website feedback and the products thread, we shall fight in the (church-)hills; we shall never surrender!

[SlimGauge]

In character Vidmaster7 wrote:

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight them on the general discussion forum, we shall fight on the thread and comment boards, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our website, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the product discussion, we shall fight on for the community, we shall fight on for the website feedback and the products thread, we shall fight in the (church-)hills; we shall never surrender!

Always a good one.

[Vidmaster7]

Aww guess I wasn't first :(

[UnArcaneElection]

Amazingly, this one seems to have been cleaned up quite quickly.

[UnArcaneElection]

They've broken through again!

[CrystalSeas]

And now they're gone!

Amazing defense work, Paizo staff 13 minutes from start to finish

[Dragoncat]

Aaaaaand they came back. Again.

This time they appear to have a bit of a fixation on the letters 'd', 'h' and 'f'.

[CrystalSeas]

And staff shot them down before you finished posting. Some high DEX bonuses there

[Dragoncat]

Yep.

God, Improved Initiative is a wonderful feat. :)

[Oceanshieldwolf]

Started again. Have been laying down suppression spamhammer...

[John Napier 698]

Too bad the Create new account process doesn't have a means to prevent bots from creating new accounts. Just spent the last 20 minutes flagging spambot droppings.

[Steve Geddes]

The spammers that target Paizo.com are usually real people, not bots. Pretty sad that as a species, we’ve decided it makes sense to spend resources doing that. :(

[John Napier 698]

The first one probably is Human. The bots themselves wouldn't start their own keylogger recordings.

[UnArcaneElection]

They're baaaaaaaaack . . . .

[khadgar567]

well I am reporting them when i see them appear so some of us are at least casting support magic.

[Wei Ji the Learner]

"INCOMING!"

[TOZ]

TO ARMS! TO ARMS!

[State of confusion]

Yes YES I have Two arms! What of it?!?!?!

[UnArcaneElection]

Some keep slipping through.

Edit: Flagged 5+-1 posts so far.

[William Ronald]

I flagged two posts tonight.

[The Fiend Fantastic]

Korea's knocked out of a skating competition, but that's no reason to take it out on us! :/

(Brings out flak cannons)

[GM MacShack]

Kicks in door, screaming and firing two machine guns in the air before running across the room and leaving by kicking down another door.

One of them I saw a while back seems to link to a messageboard rather than a thread somehow, so I couldn't flag it :/

[CrystalSeas]

GM MacShack wrote:

so I couldn't flag it :/

I reply to those and then flag my reply

[Sara Marie]

Are they events or play by posts? If you can link it but not flag it, you can send it to the community inbox.

[John Napier 698]

If it was in Russian, then it was a link to a (quite possibly hacked) version of Internet Explorer 8 for 64-bit Windows 10.

[Sara Marie]

Never click on links in spam posts.

[Schwarzer Schatten]

They are back again.

[Steve Geddes]

They’ve obviously learned a new trick. But I bet the freshly bolstered IT team are up to the task. (Thanks, tech team people!)

[UnArcaneElection]

I have now started paying attention to where they are. Flagged 4 identical posts in Paizo General Discussion. None of them had live links, and they were all from different user names.

Edit: 3 more of the same post in Paizo General Discussion, all different user names from each other (I think also all different from the previous 4).

[UnArcaneElection]

Everything seemed fine, and then all of a sudden 2 more (different user names) showed up in General Discussion. Flagged as Spam.

[Wei Ji the Learner]

There were several more than 2.

All the ones I saw I flagged.

Symbols look like simplified Korean.

[John Napier 698]

Sara Marie wrote:

Never click on links in spam posts.

I didn't. As a programmer, I know better. The program's description was in English.

[Decimus Observet]

More spam in Korean characters.

[mildly annoyed Vidmaster7]

Yes they are back again.

[The Raven Black]

Reminds me of the good old times some years ago

Spam as the first motive for flagging would make us even a bit faster

[Tusk the Half-Orc]

100+ in the Paizo/General Discussion forum, and they’re still coming! Flagging now!

[Chyrone]

Flagged another 11.

I put it through the (horrible btw) google translate.
It's advertisement for casinos.

Come on, put something like this in a tourism brochure, you know?

[Gisher]

Chyrone wrote:

Flagged another 11.

I put it through the (horrible btw) google translate.
It's advertisement for casinos.

Come on, put something like this in a tourism brochure, you know?

I wonder if they found lots of references here to rolling dice and playing cards, and they thought "this must be a forum for gamblers." ;)

[Marc Radle]

Good lord, it looks like there are hundreds of them!
Spam really Infuriates me - it’s a scourge and I wish there was a way to stamp it out.

In Paizo’s case, it seems like disallowing posts using foreign characters might be a good first step ...

[John Napier 698]

Korean characters are in 16-bit Unicode, meaning that the character values are above 255. If we scan each new post, we can filter out the ones that have a majority of characters above 255.

[Chyrone]

Gisher wrote:

I wonder if they found lots of references here to rolling dice and playing cards, and they thought "this must be a forum for gamblers." ;)

Maybe that's it. :D

[Dean Ludwig]

Everyone,
We are ware of this issue and will look into this as soon as possible. We appreciate your feedback and comments on the issue

Dean