In the last two weeks or so, we have seen a spike on our site. We’re seeing typical spam with hidden links on new replies from new accounts. When we increased the reputation for creating new posts, we saw AI-generated responses increase, and it seemed the bots were trying to slowly increase their reputation on bogus accounts. These responses don’t have obvious bogus links, they just have generic AI text that doesn’t contribute to answering the question.
We got hit over a weekend with a large spike in spam posts, enough that someone created a new topic saying there was too much spam on our forum. Since then, admins need to check the site every day to clean up bogus AI posts. We’re also seeing AI posts on accounts that were created in the past and had no activity, which makes it seem like some spam bots had been seeding accounts for a while and letting them sit with no activity. Now they are trying to slowly get past the engagement limits so they can post new topics.
As noted above, we increased the trust levels for posting new topics. We also enabled akismet. But this hasn’t stopped the AI spam posts. Currently we need an admin/moderator to check the forum every day to review flagged posts and clean up. Some are challenging and look like they might be a person, so two people need to check.
We encouraged our users to help out and flag posts that look like AI and that has helped.
Our forum is fairly low volume and has run for years with very low admin clean-up and maintenance, but it seems the AI bots have found us. I’m thinking AI may be needed to stop AI?