Interesting new users?

[Vilefruit]

Hi, everyone!

A little bit of an odd thread today, but I'm not sure if anyone else has posted about it.
Have any of you perused the newest user list? For the past few weeks, they've all been postless- and all have some pretty odd links in their website information.

That's not all, though! Many of them appear to have the same one.

Spoiler

I'll spare you the trouble. Almost every single one of these links is a digital pharmacy website disguised as something educational, or nondescript.

This goes back tens of dozens of pages. Occasionally, the link/type of scam website will change- but equally be shared by 15+ users.

Has the battle of the bots begun, or this been an ongoing struggle? And just who on earth buys these fertility vitamins, anyway?

I fear for the worst, the Keep has been overrun with not Magi, but... Salesmen.

Lend me your thoughts!

~*~

Update: Originally, I just thought that this was a funny problem- but I recommend not surfing for the profiles of these bots too much. There's some terrible stuff, and there is A LOT of them. I hope they're taken down soon!

[blockEdragon]

Yea the site has a serious spam account problem, it's had this issue since I joined and probably long before that.

[pegasi1978]

Accounts like that were a problem back when I was a moderator here and I haven't been a moderator for about 10 years.

[Raneth]

We keep squashing the bots, they keep coming back. It's an eternal battle.

[crazyflight]

fwiw there's always the chance that the links in their profile have malware or some other bad stuff, so clicking through may not be the best idea. not that i really know how common things like that are, but it's always better to be on the safe side until they get removed

[Vilefruit]

We keep squashing the bots, they keep coming back. It's an eternal battle.

Thank you for your vigilant fight! You will always be remembered.
I would definitely check out the user websites sorted under “z” for some ban-eligible bachelors.


Thank you for the rest of your senior user experiences and responses! I think it’s a good thing to know about in case someone ever gets an unsavory PM or almost clicks an unfamiliar link.

[Kesstryl]

I agree with crazyflight, don't click their links! You could get malware installed on your computer from infected links.

[Kestrad]

What Raneth didn't mention is that if you go to the Tea House, you can probably surface an old story they wrote many years ago about this exact issue

I see people have already posted warnings about how opening the links is not a good idea, but I want to add that if you're driven by morbid curiosity and do want to look at the links, always use an incognito tab to do so. Make sure that you don't have any other incognito tabs before doing so, or if you do, that you're not logged into anything using an incognito tab. This will protect you from a lot of potential attacks (though not always all of them) just because there's no useful information to steal from you when you're in an incognito window.

[BBkat]

The bots must be getting smart to get past the anti-bot measures that are supposed to being in place

[Reima]

The bots must be getting smart to get past the anti-bot measures that are supposed to being in place

For one they seem to be using 'pick 2 random real (sounding) names and combine them' rather than a keysmash
They're advancing