Is it time to change the forum rules so first time posts need to be approved by a mod? I know this is a lot more work for moderators - but the amount of junk posts is getting out of hand. I can commit an hour or so a day if required - maybe some of the regular posters can assist as well?
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I have been a moderator on a discourse forum for 6 years, and I know how much time it costs to fight spam.
I suggest to implement Akismet.
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Something for you @MissyQ ?
You’re not alone!
Some of us hit a rate limit for flagging too much spam. I consider it a badge of honour 
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We should have stopped the spam wave for now and removed all the reported posts.
If you still find some, please let us know.
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I lost count at how many posts I reported since midnight Eastern Time, but it had to be at least two dozen full of SEO terms for various large companies’ customer service contacts.
I don’t want to be a moderator, but am wondering if there is a way to prevent first-time posters from editing their posts? The overnight spambot seemed to be posting two lines of gibberish I suspect to bypass new thread filtering, and then immediately went in and edited the gibberish post with their SEO text and links. Each post was coming from a new user, as their first ever forum post. If there was a forum user role/rule for new users to not have edit permission for so many days, it would have discouraged the spammers when they couldn’t edit the gibberish to add their SEO links and hopefully make them move on…
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Looks good - went and had some dinner and come back to a spam-less forum - well done and thanks.
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@MissyQ see this plugin.
As a sidebar, all the most active mods were sleeping or unavailable. New user sign up has been disabled for the time being and flagging limits were increased. As a sidebar, this is the largest spam attack we have seen on the forums since it was created.
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Maybe also check if the “minimum posting time” (IIRC) is set correctly. It needs to be quite low (much less than a sec). If interested, I can search for a related posting on the discourse forum.
Edit: Here it is: 100ms → Send all cases of user typed too fast to the review queue - #10 by codinghorror - Feature - Discourse Meta
regarding Akismet: I my moderator times, we didn’t use Akismet, but IIRC the Discourse developers themselves use it and are quite happy with it. A search through the Discourse forum should yield some good references.
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We run a really old configuration, not by choice, just hasn’t been updated in a while. It’s on the docket.
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Isn’t this the AI thing they offer? If so, we dug into a bit but I’m not super impressed with it.
Plugins aren’t possible to enable at this time because we self-host and our build is apparently…I dunno if I’d say a clusterfuck but maybe it is - I will mark it down as something for the Infrastructure team to look at with the other plugins I have in mind for an upgrade.
We do have that timed posting setting - it basically stops people who post quickly from getting through. However, I have just enabled new users again and applied the “approve first post” setting. In all reality, the way both settings are handled in the Review queue are basically identical at this point - both would be flagged nearly immediately and go into the queue.
A couple of mods here recently have decreased their activity. I do need a few more, but Community Day still takes up most of my days and then a trip to Ireland is happening so it needs to wait until June before I can even look at potential people. Since this process hasn’t been done since I’ve been around, I think it’s good that people know I’m a hound when it comes to vetting new moderators - if I find something that gives my gut a red flag, I listen to that feeling.
I’ll leave this thread open for a little bit more, but if we don’t have another influx, I’ll lock it down to prevent any confusion around spam activity.
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FYI, on the sites I host, I’ve found that this setting is what stops almost all of the spam bots. Set it long enough, and it stops the human copy-and-paste spammers, too.
The bots (and the humans) strive to spam as many sites as they can, in as short a time as possible. Slowing them down generally causes them to go look elsewhere.
As for moderator volunteers, I’m on here a lot but I’ve probably set a “red flag” or two at some point, so I won’t waste anyone’s time by offering.
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What am I missing here? I have been on these forums for years and can count the number of spam messages I’ve seen on one hand.
You missed >300 last night. 
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Where? I check the forums for new messages frequently. Are the moderators this good?
Many Regulars and other active users have been busy reporting them.
As soon as one of the moderation team saw that, there was a call to arms to crunch through the reports as quickly as possible.
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Kind of. The reason why it’s not obvious right now because we’re currently blocking all first posts by new users. petro locked down the ability to create new accounts to clean things up very early in the morning for me (like, 2am Pacific time).
Right now we’re at 20-30 reviews per hour. I might do the posting time instead of first post approval so that the legitimate people don’t have to wait for us to approve it.
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Thanks- I appreciate the moderators even more now.
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You’re welcome. 
I saw more than that last night in one page refresh for new posts, and I’m not even a moderator!
The forum allows users (I assume at a certain Discourse user trust level) to report spam and other posts. The reporting process immediately hides the spam post from normal users, apparently until a moderator reviews the report. There was probably one or two other people besides me reporting each spam post during last night’s bombardment, since spam posts were vanishing as I was scrolling down to report them.
FWIW, I never got @Edwin_D’s badge of honour for hitting the rate limit for flagging too much spam… 
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