Difficulties reporting unusual spam across multiple forums

General

AI-generated summary

simon-smart88 describes a widespread spam operation involving new users like “benof” who post questions with links to spam domains (e.g., igmguru.com) to manipulate search results, often using AI-generated content to appear legitimate. The main challenge is that users cannot easily report such spam due to the need to sign up on each forum and the lack of direct reporting options. simon-smart88 suggests improvements like email-based reputation systems, automated pattern detection across Discourse forums, and shared spam rules. Ed_S advises focusing on flagging posts on forums one regularly uses and supports the idea of a central clearinghouse for spam patterns, while also noting existing tools like StopForumSpam and CloudFlare could help mitigate such spam.

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A few weeks ago, I noticed an odd post on a forum that lead me to uncovering a vast reputation management operation that I’ve documented some of on GitHub. It involves new users asking basic questions while repeatedly mentioning a name, including in the title of the post, to try and hide negative news stories in search results.

I also noted another post that was a long question but contained an odd looking link to a spammy domain, and have found many other similar posts by the same username and same domain across multiple forums (user = benof, domain = igmguru dot com - search for "benof" forum).

The difficulty however, is that it is very hard for me to report this spam as a user - I have to sign up to each of the forums (and then receive endless emails), reply to the posts and hope someone notices and takes action. I can’t report posts as spam which seems like a major limitation (although understandable).

I realise this is tricky to solve and goes way beyond Discourse, but it really irks me that they waste volunteers’ time by getting answers to questions that they have no actual interest in. AI makes it much easier to make for these spammers to hide what their real motive is by asking what appear to be genuine questions.

A few thoughts of features that could help:

  • Earned reputation linked to email addresses, similar to how reputation works on Stack Overflow sites, so that if I am a legit user of one forum I can at least report spam as soon as I sign up.
  • Scanning of all posts made on Discourse forums to try and spot patterns e.g. of unusual domains being linked to / phrases being repeated.
  • Shared spam rules between forums, including retrospective flagging so that once a pattern is spotted it can be dealt with automatically.
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I wouldn’t recommend that - ideally you’d flag the posts. Which maybe as a new signup you can’t - but for that, I’d say don’t try to fix the whole internet! Flag bad posts on the forums you regularly use.

I do agree of course that this kind of spam, and most spam, is annoying and takes up community time and moderator time. A central clearinghouse of bad patterns might be an idea. Or, possibly, central barriers to access and account creation might help: stopforumspam is already a free-to-use public repo of bad accounts. The likes of CloudFlare might well block the bots or the IP addresses which are acting badly.

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