GOG has a new variation of the spam bot problem.

In the old variation, spam bots would create many spam threads with new original posts.

In the new variation, spam bots are creating posts written by AI, and then copy & pasting those AI-written posts into old threads written by legit posters, which the AI spam bots are now Necro'ing with their posts.

This has happened many times over the past week or two.

A lot of people don't seem to recognize these AI-written bot spam Necro posts as being that, so I made this thread to point out that fact.

Forum is held together with bubblelgum and bailing wire. They have no one who could figure out how to keep the report button without the downvote button. It's not their fault. The forum software is homegrown and might be older than the people actually working on it.

What I find funny is that these bots can find and reply to a thread from 6 years ago and I can't reliably search and find a thread from last week.

It's usually easy to tell them apart because the spambots have no personality, for better or worse

I'm just saying that many people are not fluent in English language and can make different kind of typos.
Some AI posts can look better than these from that point of view. I think only "being on subject or not" can be the key. The difference is: bots necro threads at random, and you are looking for specific ones. :P

These bots are pretty much everywhere scattered in every thread and they manage to create working links, it's a serious security issue that obviously GOG is not considering at all.

I think I read a joke about social media becoming nothing but bots in the near future. It'll just be bots chatting with other bots. Reminds me of this speculative documentary about the universe becoming nothing but blackholes with red dwarfs scattered about.

GOG might consider this they are just too incompetent to protect the site and us from it. They have proven time and again that they simply don't know how to handle such attacks permanently.

Thank you for the information.

To be specific, the actual spam created by those bots takes the form of inserting links into the quoted posts, so to someone just seeing that original post as quoted it'd appear that the legitimate poster included the spam.

Or the spam becomes hidden, because if viewers have already read the original post that was quoted, they are less likely to read the quote that was included by the bot...

And people criticising the bots are moderated in hours while spam from April 30th is still there almost 2 weeks later.

Forum is fucked up.

Maybe they've been implemented by CD Projekt themselves to try to artificially boost forum traffic?
J/K obviously - could see it happening in a Black Mirror ep though!

I noticed a long time ago back when it was really back (2015 or 2016) that they also included a lot of numbers, generally phone numbers. These tend to exceed 8 digits, so anything with longer than 8 digits in a thread name is more likely to be spam. (can't be sequential count because 1.2,3 !4 5 they'll just interlace to prevent simple matches, though regex is good at working around that and just finding N numbers)

Course in Youtube I'm seeing empty accounts (sharing the official channel image) with phone number whatsapp notes in the name pushing you to contact them.

Thirdly if multiple threads have 90% of the same content between new threads. Though that would likely involve diff and a little programming to compare how identical posts are.

If new accounts (or those with say under $10 of purchases) try to make a new thread, it should be limited to say 1 thread every 6 hours. That should be sufficient for a simple question on a couple games they might have (though most of the technical ones are already asked and solved for years). Though we've seen spam posts entering randomly in unrelated threads before, and that's harder to do... Other than flushing all the user(s) posts and threads when it's determined, but that might require a little programming and SQL knowledge to do.