Some new spam bots appeared, which are intelligent enough to optimise for Discourse’s built-in spam filters. They first make a comment without any links, and later on they’ll edit and add the link. Discourse doesn’t catch them this way. For example the following revision: [Developer%20API%20docs%20-%20MapHub%20community%20forum%202018-11-09%2019-11-22]

I’ve experienced this too, the most insidious are burying links in punctuation with their edits. Instead of generating clicks from the victim site they seem mostly concerned with creating inlinks and are oblivious to the nofollow being applied to said links. The other more worrying trend is wiki edits, unlike posts and post edits these don’t appear in the user activity, I can only tell that it has happened because they’ve received a wiki editor badge, without ever posting a wiki post.

I don’t see a link in that post. I just see text. Can you show raw?

I deleted the user, and I don’t remember the TL. The links were like the following: shareit MX player or https://messenger.red/ https://kodi.software/download/ or viamichelin putlocker (The end of three different posts from the same user)

TL is critical for diagnosis here, cause you can just disallow edits to TL0 which is fine, if the spam bot is smart enough to get to TL1 … well we have a diff problem.

It was able to comment 3 posts + add 6 links without triggering the spam system, I think it must have been TL1, but I might check it in a backup.

Honestly, these bots are really smart. They post a “thanks for your post” reply first. There is absolutely nothing suspicious about it, even their email address is similar to their user name. Only googling the email gives results on spam list, nothing else really. They wait for you to approve the post. Only then they later activate their spam posting bits.

These are not bots, they are humans. There has been a vast increase in human spammers in the last 8 years.

[תמונה] codinghorror: These are not bots, they are humans. That’s been my impression too. It’s borne out in a variant of the technique described in the OP that we’ve seen. In this case the spammer “replies” to a comment and uses the Discourse quote feature to copy some of the other person’s text into their message. Then they insert their link into the copied block, thus making it look like the other user did it. Not sure if this is supposed to spoof the system into thinking the link is from someone of a higher T level or what. Kinda stupid, really, but definitely seems like something that had to be done manually, not by a bot. In particular, they don’t just drop the URL into the quoted text either; they highlight some text and use the link tool, adding a further layer of disguise. We’ve seen a few of these over the last couple of months.

I’ve just noticed that spammers have been posting legitimate looking posts and then going back a few weeks later to insert links to things like [free netflix] and [tech news]. Is there any way to prevent the insertion of links on all edits by something like below TL3? Even blocking the insertion of URLs in edits for anyone less than TL4 would be fine. Or has anyone found another way to stop it? Is it possible to cause all edits by non-admins/non-moderators to bump the post? I think it would be good to see every edit. The human spammers are getting more sophisticated. Edit: I’m looking at one spammer’s post, and it looks completely legitimate and on-topic. There is no clue that it’s a spammer, except for the injected links.

Spam bots tricking Discourse filter by editing

תמיכה

sam (Sam Saffron) 12 בנובמבר,‏ 2018,‏ 7:01am 3

Is this spam bot TL1 or TL0?

נושא		תגובות	צפיות
Human-driven copy-paste spam Community Building	54	9951	24 ביולי,‏ 2025
Users editing spam links into their posts after a delay Community Building	15	2199	26 בנובמבר,‏ 2019
People editing posts into spam Product Support	13	1700	20 בנובמבר,‏ 2019
Editing Old Posts and Adding Links Doesn't Alert Anybody Feature	23	8007	7 באוקטובר,‏ 2014
Free to edit post at any time Feature	33	15934	22 במאי,‏ 2023

Spam bots tricking Discourse filter by editing

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