The whole first page, and likely many more, is 100% spam. Can we have moderator/community manager intervention?
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7The CM team is notified, the moderators are summoned, Smokey is on full-blast. If more users are willing to sign-up for auto-flagging your flags are used without anyone having to babysit the front-page.– reneCommented Oct 25 at 8:22
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IMO, there's no point using humans to fight robots, and no point burning flags to mark these spams that are obviously all part of the same campaign. The flood looks persistent and bad enough to require involvement of Stack corps. I hope they have some sort of whitelist system that lets them stop posts from newly created accounts. All spams I've looked at are from accounts that were created within the past 24 hours. There cannot be many real accounts created daily on this low-volume site, so it would perhaps be easiest to just disable account creation for a while.– doubleunaryCommented Oct 25 at 8:31
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3To my knowledge they don't have any ready solutions for this; this deluge is quite unprecedented. The same spammer has been attacking other sites on the network for 2+ years; here's a related meta post from another site from a couple of weeks back salesforce.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3241/…– tripleeeCommented Oct 25 at 8:34
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10I have disabled question asking for now.– balpha StaffModCommented Oct 25 at 10:55
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1@balpha Could you mark the pending flags as helpful too?– LaurelCommented Oct 25 at 11:34
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2@Laurel I'm just doing the bare minimum I can right now, until someone with more spam fighting experience gets in.– balpha StaffModCommented Oct 25 at 11:37
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5I've cleaned up as much as I could -- it's possible that something got caught in the middle of it; it was a very crude clean-up. We'll revisit, I just wanted to get all that crap off the site.– balpha StaffModCommented Oct 25 at 11:38
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2I'll reenable asking to see what happens, but I'm around to swing the ban hammer.– balpha StaffModCommented Oct 25 at 12:01
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4 Answers
We are aware and actively working on this issue. Thank you so much to the mods and users for flagging this for us. We ask for patience as we tackle this issue.
Now that the wave of spam seems to have settled back down, we wanted to come back and provide an update.
Generally speaking, we don't like to disclose in too much detail about attack mitigation techniques, because there's an ever evolving arms race between attackers with increasingly sophisticated tooling and our ability to programmatically identify and block bad actors. But I will at least point to some related overviews we have done in the past, noting that all of these mechanics were in play during the incident.
- How does spam protection work on Stack Exchange? (2020)
- Stack under attack: what we learned about handling DDoS attacks (2022)
- How Stack Overflow fends off scraping bots (2024) transcript
While we do as much as possible to block or rate limit users at the edge and validate content before posting, the fact is, at the end of the day, our community plays a huge role in helping us to identify and root out spam content on the site. So we just wanted to give a special thanks to the folks behind Charcoal / SmokeDetector who were fighting in the trenches with us during attacks like this and also diligently keeping the site clean every day.
On Oct 24-26th, on WebApps alone (the main target of spam) we had 3,690 helpful flags reporting spam, over 90% of which came from Charcoal users.
Users dealt with so many reports they literally ran out of flags and we had to temporarily increase the limit. If you've been gone for a week and just logging back on and thinking "what spam?" everything looks fine to me, you can see the examples of the amazing cleanup being done at https://metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/flagging/logs
We'll continue to monitor on our end, but wanted to drop in to provide an update and say thanks to the user community that keeps this place great.
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4Thank you very much for sharing this. IMO, this is one of those times when a post like this deserves to be posted as a "question" to make it more visible and accessible as a reference and to be featured.Thank you for sharing this. In my opinion, this post deserves to be presented as a "question" to make it more visible and accessible as a reference. Doing so could also help feature it more prominently. Commented Oct 29 at 17:14
Many hands actively battling this. There remains a trickle of new posts, suggested edits, and comments being added.
I've been playing Whack-a-Mole and also cleaning up the backlog of flags, etc. Thank you to everyone assisting.
As you can see in the question comments the CM team is aware and taking actions. A lot of spam posts have already deleted by several means.
P.S. A few hours ago, before this question was posted I sent a Contact Us message using the Commnunity Emergency.
answered Oct 25 at 13:17
