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[TheDarkStar]

The spammer's posts-per-day are still less than twice what TBF had for a while.

Admittedly, he registered like 10 days ago so that dilutes the posts-per-day a bit.

[milo christiansen]

Current count: 71 pages, 1417 threads.

EDIT: And it keeps adding more, now it is in the middle of page 72...

[TheDarkStar]

It's doing funny things to the forum statistics, too. The spammer is the #1 thread starter and has started about 1/4 of all threads this year.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Whoever programmed this thing sent it into maximum overdrive, and whoever programmed SMF really should have put a thread timer on.

[SurrealRose]

Jeez, I decided to do the math so it like, has 76 pages currently last time I looked (but its making more every second) of 19 threads which is like 19 x 76 which is about... 1444 and 12 extra on the 77 page making it.. 1456 threads.. in one day..

[milo christiansen]

Imagine what it would have been like if it was spamming General Discussion? Life Advice is generally really low traffic, so it isn't a huge deal.

Anyway, it is now on page 78 (20 threads per page)

[Draignean]

Jeez, I decided to do the math so it like, has 76 pages currently last time I looked (but its making more every second) of 19 threads which is like 19 x 76 which is about... 1444 and 12 extra on the 77 page making it.. 1456 threads.. in one day..

Also, since Heidegger only makes threads, you can just look at his post count. 1546 threads.

[SurrealRose]

Imagine what it would have been like if it was spamming General Discussion? Life Advice is generally really low traffic, so it isn't a huge deal.

Anyway, it is now on page 78 (20 threads per page)

Man, if it spammed General Discussion that would of been really annoying to get.. any discussion.. at all.. So at least the spammer is either very courteous in putting it in a non-active section or sent a spam bot in a forum on random and it just.. luckily randomly chose the low traffic one..

[BlitzDungeoneer]

hdgge7 is a wonderful, active member of the community

what has he done for you to abuse him so

[My Name is Immaterial]

If my numbers are right, they're posting at a rate of about once every 16 seconds, which is about as long as the forum makes you wait before posting again. IMHO, that means it could be shittly programmed, because, from what I can see, it probably is told to post, wait 15 seconds, open a new topic, copy, paste, and post. What should be done is post, open a new topic, copy, paste, THEN wait 15 seconds, and then post.

[Tawa]

Imagine what it would have been like if it was spamming General Discussion? Life Advice is generally really low traffic, so it isn't a huge deal.

Anyway, it is now on page 78 (20 threads per page)

Man, if it spammed General Discussion that would of been really annoying to get.. any discussion.. at all.. So at least the spammer is either very courteous in putting it in a non-active section or sent a spam bot in a forum on random and it just.. luckily randomly chose the low traffic one..

I wonder where we would have put an emergency backup thread if that had happened.

At the moment of this posting, the bot has about 2.5x Toady's thread count.

E: I checked in one of the threads. There's not even any links! The closest thing to a URL has bizarre capitalization. Additionally, it keeps on talking about "Gangam Casino". Now that brings back memories.

[bloop_bleep]

I think the spammer just guessed that "Life Advice" is either the most active forum or the forum best suited to their advertising. Though admittedly the spam doesn't seem much like advertising and more just random spam...
EDIT: Just finished page 86. 1713 posts.

[wierd]

Looks like a pagerank pumping operation.  Google's page rank algo (in the naively simple version, its actually more complicated than this) tracks the number of sites and search terms that link with a given location, and use the resulting scores to determine search relevance.

Somebody is using bay12forums as an exploit vector to get google and pals to promote an adult gambling site.

[Arx]

Whoever programmed this thing sent it into maximum overdrive, and whoever programmed SMF really should have put a thread timer on.

Oh, there is. If there weren't, the forums might be crashed by now.

Whether it's long enough is a different discussion.

[Rolan7]

PTW

See, what I have to wonder what the bot is trying to accomplish. Is this another kitchen supply spam, or...?

Imma repost from WTF thread.  Though I'm sleep-deprived and a little out of touch, this is how I remember it working:

Google pays a lot more attention to content on popular websites.  I assume it weights down forums, in general, but still probably a lot better than a site which has no legitimate traffic.

There's an interesting type of attack where bad actors will hack into a website and, instead of injecting exploit kit redirects, will simply add a bunch of invisible metadata similar to this casino stuff.  It's completely benign for visitors to the site, and *relatively* benign for the owner...  Though Google tends to find out, and tank their ranking as they're untrustworthy.

Because these lay undetected for so long, they're a lot more effective than say...  Overwriting the home page with a bunch of obvious casino ads.  They're only targeting the search engine spiders, not visitors.  Of course, it's also a clear indicator that the site is insecure, and will be hacked more dangerously sooner or later.