Today, a series of new users, whether by one person or many, spammed/is spamming a series of useless "answers," flooding the front page. Moving forward, what is going to be done about this and how can it be prevented/limited in the future? One idea I have, if it can be done, is to remove anything that is deleted from being labeled as "active."
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2 Answers
what is going to be done about this
Your ever vigilant and trusty mods deleted them shortly after they appeared.
how can it be prevented/limited in the future?
It can't be prevented completely. New users can always answer unprotected questions. That is part of the attraction of StackExchange.
It can be mitigated by ordinary users flagging spam. The Community bot will sometimes do this in very very obvious cases and this time even went on to protect the question in question (if you see what I mean) after I had confirmed that the answer was spam and deleted it.
This is far from the first time this forum has been spammed. The fact that this is the first time you have noticed is a tribute to the vigilance of the mods.
answered Dec 22, 2020 at 22:50
It's worth noting that there is a project by the Stack Exchange community (not the company) for fighting spam across the network: Charcoal (disclaimer: I'm a member). Most of these posts were flagged automatically, which helps in drawing attention and only one of two other additional flags (either by us moderators, or by you!) are needed to remove the posts.
It never hurts to hop over to Charcoal HQ and ask if they already know about the spam wave.
answered Dec 23, 2020 at 8:04
