Bots spamming forum

Bots have been attacking our forum and our mod team has grow tired from deleting their posts. This started sometime last month, then stopped for a short while and started again now. Is this a discourse issue or what?

Also the previous admin retired and the current one isn’t very active, so keep in mind that we’re somewhat new to discourse and the backend side of it, and would appreciate any help with this.

And we have filtered common words the spammers use, but we’ve realized that they make a post with random characters, then edit the post into their advertisement to avoid the filters.

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If you’re not using Akismet, that will likely catch at least most of it.

It’ll require your admin to configure it, though.

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If you haven’t already, you may also want to take a look at Tips for Preventing Spam

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Looks like there are some consistencies with how the spam is worded, which can help — consider adding “helpline” to watched words (also covered in the spam guide) Watched Words Reference Guide

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Thanks everyone for the help, I’ll look into Akismet and the other methods that have been mentioned.

We’ve done that but sadly these bots found a nice workaround— they make a post with random text to avoid the watched words, then after making the post and it gets approved they edit it into their spam… not to compliment the spammers but that’s kinda smart :smiling_face_with_tear:

Thanks for the help though!
Yeah, I’ll be giving that spam guide a nice read, and I’m sure we’ll beat these bots!

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I think that while “require approval” does not, the “flag” option also works for edits. Have you tried that?

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It will work if you disable new users from editing.

edit post allowed groups

You can disable tl0 from this setting

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