Admin attention required

Black Mesa Archive Website Issues
#1

I’m posting this thread as there has been no official word on whether a responsible site admin has been notified of the current spam attack, which is quickly spiraling out of control. Right now, there are eight spam accounts at work, and the number of concurrent spam accounts appears to be steadily increasing. The only currently active mod ( @TheeGoatPig ) is clearly getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of spam and he has reported that he is having trouble deleting the spam threads because of forum error messages.

The following problems must be related to the error messages he’s getting:

  • Several threads in the Website Issues subforum have lost all their posts and show up as having -1 replies in the thread index.
  • The Unofficial Official Chat Thread seems to have lost 87 pages’ worth of posts. EDIT: It appears that it’s the first 87 pages that’s been lost. When you open the thread, you see 702 pages, but in the thread index it’s still listed as having 788 pages.
    (As a side effect, my like count has dropped by one as I had a post with a like in one of the affected threads. I DEMAND COMPENSATION! /jk )[/size]

A site admin should address this issue ASAP, before too much damage is done to the forum.

#2

I noted this in another thread.

#3

I’m amused by the fact that the forums are flooded with a thousand threads titled with various Asian lettering yet you feel that this is the thread that will catch Hubi’s attention.

#4

You are right. What was I thinking.

I just felt that it was important to bring attention to the thread corruption that seemed to have occurred as a result of battling the spam, before we started losing threads like, for example, the ARG thread… So far, I haven’t spotted any other damaged threads other than the ones I mentioned, but I haven’t really checked all that much. As a regular user, there’s not much else I can do other than create a thread here. It’s not my job or place to start PM’ing admins, mods or devs about forum issues.

But Hubi came; he saw; he left. I don’t know if he saw this thread, or if anything was done, but the tsunami waves are still coming…

I think it’s sad and a shame that just about every time there’s a major spam attack, it’s hurting the forums in ways more than one. The deafening silence from the devs these days is also depressing. I know they are busy, but still…

EDIT: I’ve changed the title of this thread to make it more visible. Let me know if it’s too obtrusive or inappropriate.

#5

I must say all the “Thread was deleted by …” messages on several pages aren’t very pleasant too.

#6

I agree. On the old version of the forums, when there was a spammer I could click their name and then click “ban user, mark as spammer and delete all threads/posts by this user”. Poof!

On the current forums I have to visit their profile, fill out a ban reason, only then can I ban the user. Oh and then I have to find all their posts and threads, delete all those manually one-by-one and then via some work-around (I completely forgot how, it’s quite hidden) I can remove the “deleted thread” messages. They can literally post it faster than I can delete them.

To be completely frank, it’s just not worth all the effort. I’ll try and delete some though, now.

EDIT: not to mention, moderator actions such as moving a thread to the trash take a loooooong time to finish and I get these every now and then:

wcf.global.error.title

404 Not Found
nginx/1.11.1

#7

I am here to the rescue. It seems @ThreeGoatPig accidentally removed a good amount of legit posts so I am in the process of restoring them and cleaning up the forums. I shall report back soon.

#8

I didn’t select any posts for removal. Only topics. Any posts removed from topics were due to board errors.

And there is no R in my name :wink:

#9

And also, thank you @Hubicorn for saving me from that mess. I wasn’t going to stop trying to delete it all until it was all deleted, and I wasn’t keeping up with the incoming posts…

#10

Thank you so much!

Btw, I like @TheeGoatPig’s new title badge. ^^

#11

Aaand they’re back.

We need to close down the borders. And build a great wall.

We need to make the Black Mesa Forums great again!

#12

It seems a few more are bleeding in from some holes. I’ll be sure to keep patching them up!

#13

I’m curious, does our constant reporting of these spam posts and users actually help you with cleaning up the mess?

#14

indeed it does. I can do mass removals based on reports alone.

#15

The forum seems pretty dead, it’s like you have to wait 2 days to see a reply from anyone. I’ve also seen 2 spam accounts and it makes me wonder why spam a dead forum anyways?

#16

I doubt the spammers are targeting the users of this forum. Instead, I think what they are trying to accomplish is to increase their search engine visibility.

Even though there’s little activity on the forums, the search engine bots are constantly crawling the site, as can be seen in the screenshot below. The “Baiduspider” bot, for example, is the crawler bot for the Chinese Baidu search engine.

[attach=5533,none,567][/attach]

spiders.png
spiders.png567×580 22.1 KB

#17

Pesky little buggers, aren’t they?

#18

Oh
my
God.

Google.

The Google is reading our Hazard Course Thread!

#19

Yandex reading “In-game issues” trying to solve Russian politics.

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.