If I recall correctly, there’s a setting to change topic creation to TL1+. It should fall under the posting category of the admin dashboard (if not, try the trust levels section and if it still doesn’t work, try to search for it). If it doesn’t exist (because I haven’t used the admin dashboard for like, 2 months now), disable the creation of new users.
On the Gimkit forum (yes, a forum for a literal educational game got attacked), the bots did the same thing. A solution I would propose is not to add more watched words but to employ staff members that stay up late/are in different timezones.
I think that you should probably try and keep doing this over and over again. Alternatively, you could try to make every single account get approved before they enter, although that’ll still be hard work.
Yep. The Gimkit forum got attacked as well.
In the Gimkit forum, we have tried to flag posts like you’re giving out candy on Halloween night, but that didn’t work, even with the use of alts. The most successful solution is to get anybody TL4+ to unlist/delete topics.
That’s definitely a red flag for them.
They have it enabled, just not the normalized email setting (which, as you said, they should enable).