I access Colorado Pols through Feedly, the commercial replacement for the RSS reader Google discontinued. Spam which gets eliminated by whoever runs Colorado Pols appears in the RSS stream. Over the last few weeks, the spam which used to be all over the place has become almost totally Russian. (or at least Cyrillic)
If I click on any of these RSS links, it goes to a page not found on Colorado Pols. (after a short amount of time) But lots. So far this morning 21 posts, all in Cyrillic and all with videos.
I conjecture that any site labeled non-MAGA is under this kind of Bot attack.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
BY: MichaelBowman
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: JohnInDenver
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: davebarnes
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: unnamed
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: unnamed
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: ParkHill
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: davebarnes
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: Conserv. Head Banger
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: JohnInDenver
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: JohnInDenver
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay in the loop with regular updates!
This has been happening for a long time on this site, and the junk posts are often in a variety of alphabets. I don't think it's Putin, but I do think there's a security problem here.
This latest onslaught of diaries in Russian does seem to be more malicious than commercial in intent; those spam diaries used to merely be a way for bots to collect email addresses from people who clicked on links in the diaries, or a way to direct visitors to gaming, porn, TV or foreign sites.
I ran one of the cyrillic diaries through Google translate, and found it was just the same old commercial content. I don’t know what the purpose would be of having those all in Cyrillic.
We've always had to contend with some amount of spam as a trade-off for having a publicly-accessible publishing platform that grants access without manual input. In the past few months, the principal WordPress plugin we've relied upon for security has been rendered ineffective and these huge floods of auto-posted spam, often in Russian but many other languages including English, have been the result.
As of this morning, we've taken the temporary step of fully disabling the automatic process by which new users are granted access to post. This should not affect the posting privileges of any existing users. We'll restore this functionality once we can do so without abuse.
Whether Putin or spambots are the culprit, we'll outlast them as we always have.
Good. I think that disabling automatic posting access is a long-overdue step, which will hopefully eliminate the endless spam diaries.