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Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

#311

Post by fragmede »

troydavis wrote: post #11

Yup. The site being advertised is proxied through Cloudflare, and they're also using Supabase. Anyone from Cloudflare or Supabase care to remove your abusive customer? Also reported.

Unfortunately there's no proof that the spam accounts are linked to said site.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

#312

Post by Kikawala »

kertoip_1 wrote: post #12

So if it is possible with comments, does it mean it is possible with voting? I'm wondering how many posts recently came to main page upvoted by bots

Below submission had over 1,000 votes before being flagged.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117443

Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

#315

Post by Arnavion »

kertoip_1 wrote: post #12

So if it is possible with comments, does it mean it is possible with voting? I'm wondering how many posts recently came to main page upvoted by bots

HN doesn't have any integrity about voting in general. Look at the "about" text of https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pwdisswordfishc for example, and then look at the username.

There is a whole family of pwdisswordfish* accounts btw. The "b" account's "about" text even has a holier-than-thou attitude about it.

Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

#316

Post by notRobot »

macintux wrote: post #18

Per https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments the flood stopped 2 minutes ago.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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.

Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

#317

Post by rjbwork »

geerlingguy wrote: post #4

It sure looks like it; every front page post has a dozen or so comments from unique bot accounts. Hopefully we don't see a 'Show HN: I created a spam bot service to advertise on every HN post' soon.

Have also seen them. They all have the same name with numbers at the end. Also getting a lot of "sorry we can't service your request responses" this past half hour or so.

Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

#319

Post by pvg »

kertoip_1 wrote: post #12

So if it is possible with comments, does it mean it is possible with voting? I'm wondering how many posts recently came to main page upvoted by bots

It's surely possible but it's not quite that easy, otherwise you'd see it daily in comments. It's similar for front page posts but harder since both users and moderators nuke spam-looking things as they are highly visible.
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