Russian Hack

[mars]

did the site get hacked? don't click on any links.

[a_canadian]

Not a hack, just a spammer joining and posting, perhaps aware that the moderator(s) here don't really pay much attention to such things. Impressive that all that crap is still here a day later. When I moderated a forum spam never lasted more than an hour if I was awake, and the overlap in moderator's timezones meant the other guys took care of such things while I slept. With smartphones it's pretty easy to delete spam and ban IP blocks while out shopping or on the toilet or whatever.

[a_canadian]

Two and a half days and the Russian spammer's posts are still here. Are there really no moderators here? Recently someone was asking about one of the manufacturer subforums, wondering why it was so dead there. I see perhaps an average of 5 or 6 new threads per day overall on silencertalk, with at least half and often more being off-topic, random political s--t. It's sad, but even in the relatively brief time I've been a member it's obvious the forum is gradually fading out. Interest in active discussion of silencers seems almost gone. Place is ripe for spammers, as what moderator would bother even signing into such a dead zone? Apparently none of them.

[T-Rex]

OK, I think now it's time for a MOD

[fishman]

Wtf...

[Hasdrubal]

Well, I think part of the reason the site has less traffic lately is that there's been an impressive body of knowledge built up, and also because the senior people here point new members to search old threads when they ask old questions over again. I tend to agree with that, but if most of the ideas possible with the kind of manual equipment amateur machinists usually own have already been tried, tested and posted, then after a while there's not going to be much to talk about.

I am surprised, though, that there's been no moderator action to clean up this Russian business.

[bakerjw]

I am on here daily to make sure that things are in decent order.
I am aware that there has been a spam bot and notified Robert as soon as I was aware of it.
As a Mod, I can clean most threads; however, cleaning them up has to be done on a thread by thread basis.
The easiest way is for Robert to delete the account and all posts/threads made by the account.

<Rant snipped>

Carry on.