Fighting Spam Bots in Our Community

Rook · September 21, 2022

Hi everyone!

We have been made aware of the increased amount of posts from spam bots trying to plug a link or advertise their services. You may have seen them around the iOSGods community, specifically in the General Talk area.

These spam bots nowadays have become more human-like. They have started adding a profile picture; they engage in a few posts without linking anything, and then at some point they start linking after gaining some trust in the community. In addition, some spam bots edit their previous posts to include the links after a certain time has passed. I assume they do this as to avoid being detected; pretty smart.

Here's an example of how a spam bot looks like when they post:

Another example of the spam bot editing their post to show something completely different compared to what they initially posted:

All the above is weirdly interesting, right? Well, they take it a step further... There are spam bots that specifically create a new normal-looking topic (likely for search engine purposes) so that other spam bots can plug in their URLs or whatever it is they are spamming.

Given all the information we have gathered above, we've taken extra measures to prevent spam bots on our community. We will be monitoring to see how the bots react to our changes and also targeting any spam bot post we find and removing them as soon as possible. If you do notice anything similar to what you see in the screenshots above, hit the report button or contact a member of the staff!

That's all! Hope you learned something new today!

P.S
We're also aware of the human bots spamming gibberish in topics and we're discussing what to do about them. Keep an eye out in Forum Announcements for updates!

You may also be interested in...

Updated December 29, 2022 by Rook