This is mreiof; this thread is under attack

Something has to be done about this page: the "moderation queue" thread is under attack by an extremely hostile spammer who is posting nonsense posts up to 100 per day. I have been deleting them on the fly, but the attack is relentless and is definitely intended to overwhelm the queue.

Worse, it's a 'bot that makes word-salad account names, then spews a wall of text with a hyperlink to "generic" substandard medicines. And since it's a 'bot, it won't be swayed or reasoned with. This is the one public area of the forum, so it's going to get huckster spammed no matter what. We'll get our Delete finger exercised for sure.

Holy cow, yeah, but really—besides hitting "Delete", what can we do? How do other sites deal with this threat? And, is Dave K. aware of the issue? (I sent him a PM.) Ok, I'm going to get back to deleting……

I've noticed this too and it's ridiculous. I was wondering about Dave and if I should send him an email if I still have it.
As of now, there's 131 posts to delete. Sheesh.

I just sent Dave an email regarding the spam attack. The email address I had from back in 2013 was: [email protected]

Oh, the one I have is toon07. I sent him an email on that address a couple of times but that was a long time ago.

Hehe! Yes, I have "toon07", too. I actually sent my email to both, and neither one bounced so I'm hoping for the best.

Other public sites such as FanFiction dot Net and even Wikipedia dot Org get dumped on as well. Again, it's done by 'bots from South Asia, that do so much server routing that shutting them down is more trouble than its worth. What we have now is the best solution so far: all unvetted posts get shunted to a "green room" where the hucksters with hyperlinks can be ash-canned. We're going to be busy little beavers for quite a while.

I'm already a busy little beaver, and this is going to get old really fast. If Dave isn't aware of this, he should be.

^ Yes, Mister Cleveland, these "additions" do exist, but there's no reason to use a third party to access them. In fact, these "facilitators" just collect fees for pointing Medicare or Medicaid participants to supplemental services that are already outlined on the US Department of Health website.

One thing these automated spam posts do is list all the countries of the world. Comes in handy for a radio contest that challenges listeners to name three countries without an "A" in their name. I've compiled thirty names so far.