We are hit by a massive spam wave for days now. Others like https://ask.learncbse.in/ gave up for the moment as it seems :thinking: I’m searching here just for one variant: [image] The content changes often, the email addresses and IPs as well so blocking does reduce the amount but we didn’t fin…

Have you tried adding certain words to Admin → Customize → Watched Words → Require Approval? From your screenshot, I’d try adding these words: cash credit money loan toll-free customer care care number 0779* helpline :point_left: It can be slightly inconvenient for users, but I have Discourse se…

Thanks for the hint but please check out https://ask.learncbse.in/ (it’s not my instance but the posts are more or less the same I’m fighting against) and scroll through the last days, they are using a ton of combinations and variations of each keyword. I’m in the process of creating a lot of regex …

Just to check, but do you use the min first post typing time admin setting? I find that quite useful for catching a lot of ours.

Yes, thanks for the hint, this is set but I mean it is not that hard for the bot to just wait a few minutes :slight_smile:

This spam seems like a different type to the AI based answers/content the other topic is focused on so I’ve split it out. :+1: We do have a new AI-based tool for spam detecting which has proven to be quite effective: [image] Setting up spam detection in your community Site …

Thanks for the tip, but setting up an LLM just to fight another spammer LLM for our discourse is way too expensive for our usecase. As a spammer you can easily increase the cost for the org by just creating more users/posts, so depending on what you want to archive this could be also a motivation t…

Hi, Have you tried using Akismet ? Seems like their solution would work for you. (free for personal use, not for commercial use - don’t know how you’d categorise yourself)

Perhaps requiring every user’s first post to be approved would help a bit here? That way at least they’d never make it onto the forum publicly, and as long as you don’t have a lot of real users signing up daily, I think it would help at least some.

Thanks for all the tips. [image] Mol: Have you tried using Akismet ? Seems like their solution would work for you. We do thought about it but we have a privacy and security product which means we do need to protect our users as much as possible. The content is public for sure but not the IP A…

Yes, you are unfortunately correct - they do transmit some additional data to Akismet which may not align with your privacy policy. In that case, @Firepup650 ’s suggestion is the best one out there.

Blocking recent wave of spam

Support

juanjosegzl (Juan José González) July 19, 2025, 2:33pm 19

thank you @RGJ I just opened a PR

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Blocking recent wave of spam

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