Is the forum under attack by bots?

[Moonbogg]

I feel like it's getting spammed by bots. A lot of people with 1 post responding to each other, basically watering down the entire forum and just flooding it with garbage. Thoughts?

[PCGUY]

In a sense, yes. For a long time now we combat spam by manually reviewing new users posts until they seem trusted. That is getting harder to do as some lean on the edge of legitimate conversation. As this goes on, I feel that I have approved a few that are likely not actually people making legitimate conversation. I can't reject everything that seems a little stupid! But that is why sometimes it takes a bit for new users to get into conversations... which in turn slows everything down as they get caught up in approvals.

I am holding quite a few posts in moderation and keep removing some, but if you spot some usernames that seem to be ChatGPT like nonsense, feel free to post the usernames here and I'll dig deeper into them specifically. I'll go hunting for some more myself.

[btrettel]

There definitely are a lot of bots on SpudFiles, though few seem to be posting anything at this point. They seem to mostly be accessing the forum, slowing it down a lot if not bringing it down entirely over the past few days. PCGUY, I'd recommend blocking many of the worse behaving bots with robots.txt or even .htaccess for bots that don't respond to robots.txt. On some forums I maintain, I've had to do the same to keep the forums operating smoothly.

[Turbine32]

Effectivement il y à énormément de ralentissement sur le forum voire des fois inaccessible...
C'est mon endroit préféré de lire les sujets du forum mais l'accès des fois compliqué m'attriste beaucoup