The forum is experiencing spam from bots that post random text to bypass filters, then edit the posts into advertisements after approval. Hamzah_Alani reports the issue has recurred after a brief pause and notes the team is new to Discourse’s backend. Suggestions include enabling Akismet for spam detection pfaffman, reviewing the spam prevention guide Moin, and adding keywords like “helpline” to watched words awesomerobot. Despite these efforts, bots exploit the edit function, prompting Moin to suggest enabling the “flag” option for edits and ozkn recommending disabling edits for new users via the “edit post allowed groups” setting.
Bots have been attacking our forum and our mod team has grow tired from deleting their posts. This started sometime last month, then stopped for a short while and started again now. Is this a discourse issue or what?
Also the previous admin retired and the current one isn’t very active, so keep in mind that we’re somewhat new to discourse and the backend side of it, and would appreciate any help with this.
And we have filtered common words the spammers use, but we’ve realized that they make a post with random characters, then edit the post into their advertisement to avoid the filters.
Looks like there are some consistencies with how the spam is worded, which can help — consider adding “helpline” to watched words (also covered in the spam guide) Watched Words Reference Guide
Thanks everyone for the help, I’ll look into Akismet and the other methods that have been mentioned.
We’ve done that but sadly these bots found a nice workaround— they make a post with random text to avoid the watched words, then after making the post and it gets approved they edit it into their spam… not to compliment the spammers but that’s kinda smart
Thanks for the help though!
Yeah, I’ll be giving that spam guide a nice read, and I’m sure we’ll beat these bots!
