Really makes you realize how weird it is that there's simply no moderation available here for a lot of the time.
Though I realize that they're just here for the attention. Probably best to ignore them! At least the CATAN forum is safe for now.
Turns out after being translated it's a bunch offers to apply for fake graduation certificates from various colleges around the world. There are currently 86 different colleges listed worldwide. ( and no i not gonna list'm ) TSC just got spammed as well.
A lot of moderation is manual on these forums and as DTG is a UK business, I doubt they have any moderators on the forums overnight.
It's not even that. It's just a Chinese bot of some sort. It's in TSC General Discussion as well, so it's not just here. Fishing has not been hit, so if that's your interest, you are safe.
This issue is becoming quite common on multiple forums, and they're getting quite smart, often posting a seemingly genuine message (often copied from elsewhere on the forums), only to come back a few months later to edit their post with links to malicious websites. The goal is to increase their SEO rating by having external references to their websites. Someone at DTG is gonna have a job at improving the bot protection this week. I'm actually surprised it's only the first time I 'm encountering bots here, so the software actually did quite a good job up until now Luckily it's just a few clicks to delete an account and all of its messages/topics for the mods
Deleting the account does not delete the threads. But banning the user is a way to stop them posting.
And your information comes from? Any good admin system provides the functionality to delete all content a user posted, including posts and topics.
Well, at least it´s proving that we are a quite well behaving crowd in the moderator-less hours on this forum. Hardly any other incidents, apart from some nasty bots. Can I have my free DLC now?
Surely answer here is new members go on moderated posting for the first half dozen or so posts. Yes it means a delay to genuine posters but worth it to avoid the wall of mess that greeted us this morning. Also though I dislike the feature, sites like Trainsim dot com now use Cloudflare or similar to screen out bots.
These have been removed now. Thanks for those who have reported the issue by using the forum tools available. Raised with the DTL team to see if there's anything we can do to prevent this kind of thing happening again (we do have spam filters as standard, but it appears some of these know how to get around them).
I used to be a forum moderator on a vBulletin forum. The functionality certainly did not exist to me then if my memory serves correctly, and this forum is not a vBulletin forum, so the situations are indeed different. What I described was a worse case scenario anyway. No biggie. Unfortunate but true. Bot owners see that messages aren't getting through, so change them. Hence comments like "She likes it like this" in a live chat accompanying...well, you get the idea. I've kept it fairly vague to keep it PG-friendly here, but anyone in those chats knows what I'm talking about.
They seriously need to hire more moderators, even just one or two working during the night hours would make a huge difference in situations like this.
