Is there a way to temporarily pause this issue with spam bots by hardening the new account creation process?
At least for the meantime?
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In the meantime do not reply to these posts, just flag them.
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Flagged every single one.
But I still feel accomplished that I got a “thumbs up” from a spam bot, who also marked my sarcastic reply as a “Solution”. 
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Agreed. And yes, I think some sort of change in the account registration is in order. I can close and hide the threads (and I am as I’m seeing them), but can’t do anything to the users.
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The bad news is that I (and presumably all mods) cannot bulk delete these because I get a wonderfully vague “500 error” message rather than, you know, a nuked spammer.
So, reports are nice because Discourse will mute the accounts, but the current situation is untenable and unmanageable without the higher-ups fixing whatever is broken.
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Huh, it looks like I am now having some success again…
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Not sure what’s going on. It seems that trying to manually delete all posts in one go (rather than spamkill delete all and ban) fails randomly, but not always. So I managed to work through the queue for now and kill all the spammers.
If you spot anything, please report.
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Oh, clever. The bots have learned to make a seemingly innocent post at first… and then edit the original post with some delicious spam?
Fascinating.
When they told me “A.I. is going to change the world”, I never expected such an underwhelming use-case.
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Well… You are a bad baaad person if you just ignore the magic trick done here where
- he start with innocent post
- he add his delicious spam with edit
- his spam getting hide by the community report
- he marks another fantastic spam post as solution, so it is visibile again with more visibility
This Is marketing not spam 
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That’s not new, just surprisingly bold. And the sort of thing Discourse should, theoretically, be better at catching… Still waiting on that one.
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I own a forum and I noticed a lot of “activity” the last few years. Do you host this forum? I’ve noticed a lot of PHP and CGI “activity” like trying to find holes in the forum software -i.e. via avatars and attachments.
Maybe Discourse has a plugin for services like “stopforumspam” which is essentially a blacklist of known IPs and aliases (emails).
Also, if you plan on doing this without a blacklist (like the suggestion above) you should know, I was getting 50+ span user registrations an hour and thousands of “errors” every few minutes. My logs were huge. You are most likely dealing with bots so manual will not work.
I suppose we could forbid editing posts until the account has reached a certain threshold.
Or get an AI-powered spam exterminator.
Which will turn against us, purging all human accounts in favor of the new A.I. Overlords.
Wait! You’re human??? 
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Nope. I prefer the term: “superhuman”.
Don’t fall for his tricks, he’s a Cylon!
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What’s a cylon?
A Cybernetic Life-form Node.
Spoilers ahead if you google that.
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