Has anyone received a spammy PM today?
Asked by
PhiNotPi (
12681
)
September 25th, 2012
Over the past few hours, the community feed has been filled with literally hundreds of people earning the Guppy Award (for receiving first message). The other mods and I are starting to suspect that there is a PM spammer (possibly a bot) involved.
In a few hours, @augustlan will be online and the problem will be solved; however, I want to locate this spammer as soon as I can. In the next few hours, it is possible for many more hundreds of spam PMs to be sent.
If you have recieved a spammy PM recently, please report it to me or any of the other moderators. Thanks!
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16 Answers
Nope, can I get the message?
None yet, but I will report back here if get one; or would it be faster to use the Contact button?
First thing this morning, perp is gone.
I noticed the influx of Guppy Awards too and suspected spammers were afoot. Squash ‘em!!
I looked at a few of the jellies winning the guppy award and they all said that they had joined on June 18 and that was also their last visit.
Nope. No spammy mssgs. for me.
There were hundreds of them over the last few days. Crazy! The mods found the perpetrators and we’ve stemmed the tide. For now. ;)
Using the historically appropriate phrase: right on, Mod Squad! ;-)
Well, we did manage to solve this particular case of massive PM spamming. We are pretty sure that it was a bot that was sending the spam.
I would also like to say that if anyone receives a spammy PM, then please report it to the mods. PM spamming can sometimes be very hard to find, since the normal mods cannot read a user’s private PMs. Reporting PM spam is often the only way we can even detect that it exists.
Also, if you ever see a message on the Community Feed the says something along the lines of “GSdwgdgajssxb received the PB & Jelly award,” then please report that also. The PB&J award is the award for sending a person’s first message, and the long unpronounceable name often means that the person is a potential spammer.
No, but something else weird happened – when I first loaded the Fluther page today it showed I had a new message. Then when I clicked on the (1 new) link, and it took me to my messages, there wasn’t a new one. Did you guys go through and eradicate the spammy messages or something?
@wildpotato When we ban the spammer, all the PMs they’ve sent are automatically deleted. Unfortunately, the “messages for you” ticker isn’t smart enough to realize it. ;)
I also had the message that wasn’t still there like @wildpotato .
It did show up in an email alert and yes it was spammy.
There appears to be another round of PM spam going on!
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