Removal of Spam threads.

Slackware's forum, and possibly others got hit tonight fairly hard by spammers in possibly Japanese, Korean, or Chinese language (?) and it's made a mess burying topics way down the list.

I know LQ has a policy about deleting topics, but shouldn't this be an exemption to the rule?

We are working on that, please be patient.

in lqspy i notice most of the spammer user names contain the string

*[0-9][0-9]shig*

There's more variation in the user names now. Blocking by name probably won't be effective.

This doesn't seem like normal spamming. Seems more like an attack. And it's still going on.

I know, I am banning them as they come for now, since I was not able to contact Jeremy for now, which is not surprising, given that timezones still are a thing
As I said please be patient, this issue will be resolved in the not so distant future.

@TobiSGD:Thanks. Your hard work is appreciated. This must be a real pain for you guys.

I sent Jeremy a Tweet earlier. It is rather early in the morning.

What about the IP Tobi? Are all the offending accounts coming from a single source region or is it spread all over the map?

I haven't had the time for now to look into the regions, I am banning people constantly for about 3 hours now, about 1-3 every minute, all I can tell you so far is that they don't use a single IP block.
Haven't seen a spam flood this large since I am a mod here.

Thanks for your efforts TobiSGD and anyone else who is at the top level dealing with this.

Clearly appears to be certain forums, but I'm sure they also would proliferate as much as possible unless stopped.

This is a good thread to monitor for reports on things, I've been subscribed since post #1 or 2.

Not sure if it's in your abilities, but what about locking down registrations temporarily until a damage assessment can be made and the mess cleaned up?

To be honest it looks like bots.

Only root can do that, so until Jeremy is aware of the situation all I can do is to slow them down, swinging the banhammer wildly.

Originally Posted by TobiSGD Only root can do that, so until Jeremy is aware of the situation all I can do is to slow them down, swinging the banhammer wildly.

Joking, but ... poor guy takes ONE DAY OFF! And then ...

I wonder if maybe you could make this thread a sticky that shows at the top of zero replies view? That should at least help you keep from having everyone send in a report when they first see the issue as I did because I didn't know this thread existed.

I am not sure if that is even possible, since the Zero Reply List is actually a search result, not a forum. In any way, that is far beyond my knowledge and like permissions. Regarding reporting posts, I don't really care, for now I am just ignoring reports and just look at new threads. We can clean that up later.

Originally Posted by Z038 This doesn't seem like normal spamming. Seems more like an attack.

That's what it's looking like to me too.

And I'm aware that since I can't see the posts that were removed or moderated out, the problem is clearly much worse than it looks.