Hopefully we don't see a 'Show HN: I created a spam bot service to advertise on every HN post' soon.
Claimed at the time to be working on HN support
The usernames of the spammers are "2genders<number>", "SEXMCNIGGA<number>", and "indianmilf<number>"; for some strange reason they keep the same prefix and just alter the number so it should be easy for admins to block them. Some of them are posting Twitter links as well.
Anyone from Cloudflare or Supabase care to remove your abusive customer? Also reported.
If I were a competitor to the linked account and wanted to cause then damage, I could run a bot campaign purporting to be from them in order to get them kicked off their provider.
Anyone who does business with this outfit has it coming.
Also the comments all seem to end with a 15 character random string, which I assume is just there to add entropy and avoid identical comment detection.
Shameful if true. But unsurprising.
For historical purposes
Edit: nope, it's still ongoing, there are spam comments on this very thread from 2 minutes ago. The new comments link doesn't show dead comments.
[0] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe52_7L-JqY6OqhL0FJ...
Which is also ironic because why would this guy reuse the same username for his little spam campaign when it can be nuked in one line of code…
Amateur stuff.
Never seen it happen before though!
And yet, he bested you, the supposedly experts at web dev and hyperscaling. You create trillions of dollars of value. And yet, your social hot spot is beyond laughably bad at handling that "incompetent" attacker.
It’s going to be interesting how spam evolves. At-least spammers who aren’t lazy.
Already many of the recruiting emails I get sound a lot human. They are bots though since they send at 9am everyday
Yeah, I was surprised by the amount, it feels like an attack rather than spam.
I hope this didn't interrupt Dang from something more important.
The temporary solution is to shadow ban the comments, the usernames seems to follow 2 naming schemas. Banning them completely will alert the attacker to change the naming schema, or to make it more random, which will make stopping them even more difficult.
function modifyElements(pSel, cSel, rxStr) {
const regex = new RegExp(rxStr, 'i');
const pEls = document.querySelectorAll(pSel);
pEls.forEach(pEl => {
const fEl = pEl.querySelector(cSel);
if (fEl && regex.test(fEl.textContent)) {
pEl.style.display = 'none';
}
});
}
let rx = /(hi are u lonely|want (an )?ai gf?)/i;
modifyElements(".athing.comtr", ".comment", rx);
Is a certain threshold of users required to flag a comment before it's removed?
No, 1000s of bot accounts commenting 30+ per minute are quite obvious
> Is it some kind of coordinated flood attack?
Looks like it
> And is an AI girlfriend really a feasible idea?
It's the new penis enlargement and viagra spam
If some entity protests effectively (penetrates the spammer's own anti-spam, anti-communication precautions), threaten to spam them harder. Then follow through. We're seeing some follow through, I reckon.
Yeah this thread is full of spam.
There is a whole family of pwdisswordfish* accounts btw. The "b" account's "about" text even has a holier-than-thou attitude about it.
Also people flag strange threads, so the detection is not only automatic. If you notice something strange, you can send an email to dang: hn@ycombinator.com
https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-amazon-max-animation-exposed-server/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/22/politics/us-animation-studio-sketches-korean-server/index.htmlIt might be a lot of spams, but it seems to come from a single account using a single sentence. Spammers are getting lazy these days.