I'm currently being flooded with spam, what can I do?

[Tealk]

Hello, I’m currently being flooded with these posts. I’ve closed registration because I couldn’t find any other setting to stop it.
Do you have any tips for me?

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

We’ve got a guide that explains some options here:

Tips for Preventing Spam

This documentation provides a comprehensive guide on preventing spam in Discourse forums, and includes information about various settings and tools designed to help maintain a spam-free community environment. Required user level: Administrator On most forums spam is rare. However, if you’re having problems with spam on your site, Discourse comes with numerous tools to help you automatically prevent spam. The following guide offers some recommendations on how…

AI spam detection would definitely catch posts like that, but you may also have luck with the watched words feature if there are some consistent phrases in the spam posts.

[Tealk]

Hmm, but then I need an LLM provider, and they’re all expensive.

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

They’re not really expensive.

And I’ve shared two tips in that topic that don’t need an LLM.

Tips for Preventing Spam

One very useful regular expression is \d{3}-\d{4}|[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-]+(\.[a-z\d\-]+)*\.[a-z]+ which blocks email addresses and phone numbers. Don’t forget to enable settings - posting - “watched words regular expressions”.

Tips for Preventing Spam

We’ve seen a number of clients hit by large spam attacks lately, and what they all had in common is that they opened up one or more categories to everyone - create, bypassing all trust level restrictions. For seasoned Discourse admins it’s obvious that this is a bad idea, but for less experienced people it’s not. So it might be a good idea to state the (for us) obvious and add this to the start post of the topic.

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

@Tealk

Do you have any tips for me?

Hi, yes, this can be helpful:

Watched words to block recent spam attack

I’ve had at least two sites get hit with a wave of spam that looks like it’s designed to poison LLMs. The same attack has also been reported here at least once (Anyone else currently undergoing mass spam attack?). The best solution is to set up Discourse AI - Spam detection, which I do recommend, but it’s a bit of a bother. Here’s a stopgap you can implement that will take just a few minutes. It assumes that you have a unix-like operating system (e.g., linux or mac). If you use Windows and can…

Other Discourse forums have been the targets of this attack (mine included).

[NateDhaliwal]

Or you can look at free models on OpenRouter, like Gemini.

[merefield (Robert)]

You don’t need AI to solve this btw. Just initially a bit of work to review all first posts then ban the bad users and their IPs.

My forum had a very similar attack very recently and after doing that the situation was under control within half a day.

[piffy]

@merefield

review all first posts

this is the way if you have the bandwidth to do so