Honorable knights and noble ladies!

I have come here to ask your assistance in stopping the wave of spambots that have infiltrated our lines.

In my efforts, I have ventured through many game subforums and struck down multiple threads. However, I am afraid not all have perished.

Should you find a subforum where spam threads still remain abundant, please provide a link (to the sub forum - can't delete threads from within the thread) here below. I vow to boldly go and defeat it, bringing peace and order to all the realms!

I SWEAR I went through the first page of those like 20 minutes ago... :/ But I shall go at it again! My good comrade is also trying to ban them from the mysterious back-end system we use, we will see how effective it will be.

We're trying to battle these guys by changing their emails, blocking them from forums etc. in the backend here in the marketing area. There's an independent deadly force in the support team, who do their best to react to info via support channels. Hopefully, together, we'll conquer (at least some of) the spambots!

When they went from 5-20 threads per sub forum to 100, I was no longer able to catch up D:

I will do my best to get more people (that are more knowledgeable in communicating with computers and making websites do things) in on this. I'm sorry if I've failed you :(

I'd noticed SOME spam before, but I must've not encountered the forums that were as flooded by it - I'm in contact with support and the web team to figure something out, though. Hopefully, there'll be something we can do soon!

UPDATE:

The web team has put more men on the job of creating a solution to this problem. It will be done ASAP - they need to make sure it doesn't delete regular posts as well as spam once implemented, which is why it's not a question of one button (the big red button that has "DELETE EVERYTHING" on it).

I'm hoping this will get implemented quickly, and I'm asking you all for a bit more patience - we'll restore order to the forums!

Now, back to my banhammer (and figuring out how your banhammering scripts work)!

There's a risk they'd still slip by somehow, or that users that use special characters of some sort would get banned if we do a quick solution like that, plus it might not be technically possible, so instead the web team is concentrating efforts on creating a solution that would deal with spam in general and spammy user accounts :)

It seems to always be the top sub forums, doesn't it? Or did they also go into the smaller game forums, inside threads etc.?

I've been going through the wishlist as well, but I can't commit more than an hour or two each day to being the human spam-filter, I have too much other stuff on my plate work-wise :(

Also, if you guys are still determined to fight the good fight and battle the spam bots with those scripts and whatnot, feel free to - I will let you know if the devs inform me it's interfering with their own plots :) I'll do my best to help out as well, and hopefully at least minimise the amount of spam before a solution is ready to implement.

Actually, it wasn't a prank, but an attempt to get rid of some spam while we try to work on a permanent solution with more men on the job (with fewer CEOs involved than you seem to think ;) ). And it was a success!

Lo and behold, we have implemented an anti-spam system that should stop subforums and the general discussions forum (both language versions) from being flooded by spambots!

It's an external API that blocks users based on IP from a general spam database. So far it seems to be effective (2 spambots have already been "caught" before they could post), and works well - revoking a user's posting rights.

As this is a new solution, things may go wrong - they shouldn't, but there's always that slim chance that they might, so I'd like to say ahead of time what to do in the two cases that come to mind:
-- Some of you might get added to the spam list and be unable to post. If that happens, contact our support via email and they'll unlock you as soon as they see your e-mail.
-- Not all spam might get filtered - in that case, please link a spammy thread here or in a support ticket and we'll add the bot manually to the "black list".

We hope this will work as a solution to keep 'em bots well away from here!

[edit] Previously created spam threads have to be deleted manually. We'll do our best to get to all of them, but we may miss some - so be patient and link 'em if you keep finding some old ones after a day or two, please!

I've let the dev team know it remains an issue (we initially thought it was a bunch of bots trying to raise the SEO value of their product - which is usually known spammers), they're looking into it and trying to find a way to improve the method. I'll keep you posted on updates.

It's a solution for now, until we solve the spam problem. Then, if we find a better one, we'll implement that instead of this :) we're considering a few now, but are going to wait a few days until we can see if spam has cleared up or not before we make a move (to know if this is a "safe option" in terms of spam protection to fall back on).