Tealk  
                
                  
                    September 4, 2025,  8:06pm
                   
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              Hello, I’m currently being flooded with these posts. I’ve closed registration because I couldn’t find any other setting to stop it.
             
            
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              We’ve got a guide that explains some options here:
  
  
     
 
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.
             
            
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                Tealk  
              
                  
                    September 4, 2025,  8:47pm
                   
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              Hmm, but then I need an LLM provider, and they’re all expensive.
             
            
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                RGJ  
              
                  
                    September 4, 2025,  8:49pm
                   
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              They’re not really expensive.
And I’ve shared two tips in that topic that don’t need an LLM.
  
  
    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”.
   
 
  
  
    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.
   
 
             
            
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                Canapin  
              
                  
                    September 4, 2025, 10:21pm
                   
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Hi, yes, this can be helpful:
  
  
    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).
             
            
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              Or you can look at free models  on OpenRouter, like Gemini.
             
            
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                merefield  
              
                  
                    September 5, 2025, 10:57am
                   
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              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.
             
            
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                piffy  
              
                  
                    September 5, 2025,  7:15pm
                   
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 merefield:
 
review all first posts
 
 
this is the way if you have the bandwidth to do so
             
            
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                system  
              
                  
                    October 5, 2025,  7:15pm
                   
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