There seems to be quite a lot of comment spam getting through to the forum of late.
I posted a comment last night over in 'William's World', in the 'Chamber of Dreams' thread (I'll repost below), about this very matter, and without wishing to appear 'preachy', thought it may be worth highlighting again...At the very least, it may help prevent someone (not aware of the possible dangers) clicking any links in these spam messages and possibly getting themselves into all sorts of bother, whilst this spam still appears to be getting through to the forum.
Repost:
This spam is created by spambots...a computer program that helps to spread spam across the Internet..they certainly can be very sinister in nature, involving all sorts of scams and malicious downloads..Internet forum users beware, do not click any links in spam messages/comments (emails etc)….at best, spam is unwelcome and totally annoying.
The vast majority of this online spam is fully automated by spam bots, you are not interacting with a real person, these are just preprogramed messages or conversational scripts spread by these bots...they are normally very easy to spot, be nonetheless, some people still click the links posted and can find themselves in all sorts of trouble.
It is common for spam bots to create fake accounts on internet forums, since creating a user account is often very simple, only requiring name, email and password, so attackers program spam bots to fill out the required fields automatically, a simple task for a skilled programmer. Once spam bots have an account or otherwise have access to a platform, they will start pushing out spam messages according to a predetermined (by the bot creator) set of rules.
The above type of spam is known as comment spam, which appears in the user-generated comments section of a website, i.e. on the forum.
This spam needs removing immediately really....and there should be a decent bot-management solution put in place...this should automatically identify the good bots from the bad bots and mitigate the bad ones....
Bot management refers to blocking undesired or malicious Internet bot traffic while still allowing useful bots to access web properties. Bot management accomplishes this by detecting bot activity, discerning between desirable and undesirable bot behaviour, and identifying the sources of the undesirable activity.
Bot management is necessary because bots, if left unchecked, can cause massive problems for web properties. Too much bot traffic can put a heavy load on web servers, slowing or denying service to legitimate users (sometimes this takes the form of a DDoS attack). Malicious bots can scrape or download content from a website, steal user credentials, rapidly spread spam content, and perform various other kinds of cyberattacks.
A bot manager is any software product that manages bots and should be able to block some bots and allow others through, instead of simply blocking all non-human traffic. If all bots are blocked and Google bots aren't able to index a page, for instance, then that page can't show up in Google search results, resulting in greatly reduced organic traffic to the website, etc.
It's a good idea for any website/forum to have bot management in place.
There was an alert I received the other day for some spam by someone called ‘katejohn790’ in Bill’s 8 April, 2019 journal entry that I thought might be (but probably wouldn’t be) from Kate St. John before I clicked to read it. Reckon that could be defined as a sort of click bait, just clicking of the alert, thinking it might possibly be something from Kate. Like most of the spam posts here, though, the grammar is immediately strange from the first sentence and the post unrelated to anything that preceded it.