Anyone else currently undergoing mass spam attack?

[WaitroseCarpark (CARPARK)]

First it started with promoting airline helpline numbers, now it’s moved onto quickbooks help. Around 150 threads started in the last 10 hours.

I’ve found the discourse spam filtering pretty efficient and don’t usually have to delete any more than a couple threads/users at a time for it to stop but this one’s different.

They look a little like this (I’m not pasting actual content):

Have tried to tighten up sensitivity and time to write first post but now I’ve temporarily disabled user registration as it was still coming through.

I’m guessing it will just die off but wondering if anyone else is suffering from this right now?

[NateDhaliwal]

I think there have been a few reports of this recently. You can find some tips on how to mitigate this 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…

Also, here’s a guide for using the ai plugin to combat spam:

Discourse AI - Spam detection

This guide explains how to configure and use Discourse AI’s spam detection feature, including the setup process, scanning criteria, classification logic, customizations, and contrasts with AI triage. Required user level: Administrator This is now default turned on for Starter and Pro customers, as well as our legacy Basic, Open Source, Creator, and Business customers. Discourse AI provides an efficient spam detection feature that identifies and…

[nat (Natalie T)]

@WaitroseCarpark

I’m guessing it will just die off but wondering if anyone else is suffering from this right now?

We do get customers suffering from spam attacks at various times, not just isolated to this week or next. It could be 1-2 communities this week, and then 2-3 communities next week, and sometimes none in a week. FWIW, we have new spammers every day on meta.

That said, I highly recommend using the discourse-ai plugin’s spam detection as Nate quoted above. You can use a cheap LLM like Gemini Flash and I can attest it works very well.

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

There was a topic about a similar attack, as it seems to have hit many Discourse instances, but I can’t find it; it seems it has been deleted?

I was advised using ai as well.

I didn’t use it at this time so I did two things:

I prevented new attacks on my instances by installing Stop Forum Spam Plugin ( unofficial)

I also ran a rails script to delete accounts (and their posts) created in the last X hours to recover the forum in a proper state.

In the future, I’ll have a more serious look at ai since it’s the recommended (and official) solution to prevent this.

[WaitroseCarpark (CARPARK)]

Thanks for the responses, I wasn’t aware the AI plugin dealt with spam as well. Will set that up now and see how I get on.

Thanks all!!

[nat (Natalie T)]

Great, let us know your feedback if you have any.

Hilarious username / name btw.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

Here’s what I did to deal with what sounds like the same attack.

Spam: Retroactively get AI to review recent posts and then delete the ones marked as spam

I helped out a site that got hit about about 30 spam posts per hour. We turned on AI Spam, but that didn’t solve the problem of the existing posts. Here’s what I did. This might work for you. It’s not tested on your site, so if you do any of these things you should make a backup and also make sure that it looks like this wasn’t written by an AI that is trying to take down your site. This assumes that you know what rails is and how to run it. If you don’t, you probably shouldn’t be doing this. F…