@tripleee tbh least on SU if a spam wave annoys me enough....

I wiped out all the insurance spammers over 4 yeara

Also the escort spam

@Feeds Next stop, Oneboxland?

@rene Kenny is dead... TOD unknown. :(

@JourneymanGeek you mean you escorted them out.... :P

@ShadowWizardHatesOmicron ._.

@JourneymanGeek ‾˙‾

waffles!

^wow, linking that 18+ PH site in there. One serious troll there

it's common enough that the domain is tagged #troll in metasmoke

Apparently a biriyani is a food so delicious, it needs spamming on a math site to even get people to try and eat it.

It's delicious for me though :)

So far, I've learned that the taste of food and how healthy it is... often don't match, at least not if you ask my taste buds XD

So I think I'll just steer clear ;)

For extra fun - the name of the spammer translates to "Wedding Feast Biriyani"

@JourneymanGeek Well I don't particularly like weddings either :P

→ 20 messages moved to Chimney

^ returning spammer, sevenmentor click-through

@tripleee all gone I think

the autocad one just before the Chimney message is still up

needs one more I think

I flagged it

poof

yay, thanks

@Luuklag where?? ;)

@ShadowWizardHatesOmicron in the smokes

@tripleee, can I let MS do a case sensitive search?

it does by default

@Luuklag Smoked PH.... :D

@ShadowWizardHatesOmicron sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0015626474903277

@tripleee Then I'm not very good at regex searching. I tried to search for body's that matched AT*DOT

you need to have a metasmoke account to use regex, are you logged in?

But the first hit already doesn't match. And yeah I'm logged in.

This is the first hit: metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/post/342504

that doesn't match at*dot because of the underscore

try at*_*dot?

Same result pops up :/

While I expect to find this: metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/post/347172

works for me metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/…*_*dot

oh you mean AT.*DOT

try this metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/…*%5Cw%2B%5B%5CW_%5D*dot

\b is a word boundary (otherwise you end up searching for "fat dots" too) and \w+ is one or more alphanumeric characters

\W correspondingly is non-alphanumeric

and we include _ in the non-alphanumeric which for weird reasons is included in \w

(so the regex is not completely unambiguous wrt underscore but with enough context that's mostly harmless)

quick recap, * in glob means "any characters" but in regex "the previous expression repeated zero or more times, as many as possibe"

and very often you will want to avoid . "any character" especially in .* "any character repeated zero or more times, as many as possible" because of the "as many as possible"

perhaps see also stackoverflow.com/a/53368989/874188

@tripleee I think the biggest thing for me is that it does return hits that aren't case sensitive.

so you want that to be case sensitive?

and when searching for AT that becomes a bit of a problem

yeah that would be best

stupid chat formatting search

and of course then use upper case instead of lower where that's what you mean

@tripleee yeah thats exactly what I meant, thx. Looks like loads of TP's lately on that

not in a place where I can immediately investigate; appreciate if you can provide pointers when I get back

@tripleee In Upper case its even better. 48 TP's vs 3 FP's

@tripleee Blame Larry Wall. ;) stackoverflow.com/q/49533901/4014959 I guess it's handy when you're grepping source code in languages that permit underscore in identifiers.

Those customer care looks angry...

Isn't this too much ? -_-

in fact we have been arguing for a long, long time that a single spam is too much; but we don't get to decide

the legislators who could decisively affect the situation decided not to, on a number of occasions, in a number of jurisdictions

though the volume of this is reaching the kinds of proportions where it would make sense for Stack Overflow Inc to seek legal remedies

Is this revenge for their failed DDOS?

@tripleee I think this would qualify as something mods can escalate as 'site is under spam-wave attack' yes.

Needs a serverfault mod though.

@Tinkeringbell, can you have a look at this answer: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/375785/… Appears to be completely bogus to me

@Luuklag Doesn't seem bad enough to mod delete... Seems like someone trying to answer all the questions, not just the question of where the questions go. I would take their advice with a heavy grain of salt though, they don't seem to have experience with the site scope of Law.SE

Gave it a vote, a comment and a flag to put it in a queue, lets see what happens.

I am gonna dial that number -_-

oh that's a different number

And another post with different number 👇

@Tinkeringbell There's like one active one

Hmm. Well it seems to have slowed down a bit again...

@tripleee lol. This happens periodically

Probably no use to go bother a CM in the TL at this point.

@Tinkeringbell yeah it's nowhere near the Indian Hacker

@ShadowWizardHatesOmicron actually looks as bad as that insurance spam wave

or the streamer spam wave

@Feeds Onebox recap 101

@JourneymanGeek and how did they stop? Needed CM?

@ShadowWizardHatesOmicron What was that incident ?

@ShadowWizardHatesOmicron No idea actually

its like it was one single spam dump, and then they left

I finally got rid of the last of em last month :D

@ShadowWizardHatesOmicron there's a few mod specific tricks we have but that relies on obvious commonalities and a really cheesed off mod :D

@Wolgwang I approve of your ava :D

@ShadowWizardHatesOmicron I think I may have missed that one :)

@Tinkeringbell I think it was before I became a mod

Oooooh that's ancient history than, prehistoric times :P

Can mods temporarily stop users(aka Switch off 'ask question' section) from posting questions?

@Wolgwang no

and wouldn't help here

actually if they did post, they'd be flagged and hobbled

What if say 20 people are posting 5 spam posts per minute?

@Wolgwang very long time ago, Indian teenager tried to hack or DDoS Stack Exchange, when blocked started to spam threats against SO/SE mods/staff. Tim Post took good care of the spammer though.

@Wolgwang tbh, that's managable

The only thing stopping this would be disabling asking for new/anon users.

@JourneymanGeek 100 bots posting 50 spam posts per minutes XD?

@Luuklag already disabled on some sites like SO, no?

or, well, raise the rep for posting to 2, just like MSE before

@Wolgwang oh, that's when we call in a CM

@Tinkeringbell indeed! ;)

+ round up any mods with some time to burn

@JourneymanGeek They can switch off 'ask question' ?

@Wolgwang they have tools we don't

Fun tools. Dangerous tools.

I THINK some sites turned off unregistered posting, for example.

also if something is 'bad' enough, they could, in theory get SRE and dev support

blocklists for example

Found the first reference to it here:

On our end, flagging means stuff goes into spamram

@JourneymanGeek ava ?

avatar

@Wolgwang avatar, profile picture.

DOGGIE

You might know it as "display picture". @Wolg

SmokeDetector Speak of the devil

@ShadowWizardHatesOmicron see chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/9104970#9104970

→ 13 messages moved to Chimney

→ 88 messages moved to Chimney

@rene oh my, missed it.

Poor Kenny.

Ah fitness is the new trend in spammer land

Good thing Smokey has auto-flagging, seems to help a lot with the current spam wave. Don't think I ever had 6 of my autoflags used in a day before, in all the years I have set it up.

I've had 9 of my flags used today and another 18 failures because I ran out of flags on that site.

@Mithical Good to know that is what results in a failure

I have some failures in my logs as well, not for today though, but I can't imagine I ran out of flags on those sites. Perhaps the post was already deleted by the time autoflagging kicked in?

that also causes a failure

There's a rollover (that only works on Desktop, on mobile you can use view-source) to see the reason for the failure: <td class='' title="You can only flag for moderator attention 18 times per day">Fail</td>.

@Rob If I mouseover the "fail" I get some internal server errors, and some 504 errors

504 is: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/504 - is there a proxy involved?

@Rob I don't know. It's all autoflags for me

My last fail was a few minutes ago,so it's working for me.

Looking at all autoflags, there is definetly some improvement possible

Smokey could keep logs on when a user can no longer spend flags for the current day, and move on to other users for that given site.

metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/flagging/logs

anyway, im going to call it a night.

It will be tomorrow in 2h10m, so that will reset our flags.

@Rob looking at the logs I see people fail multiple posts in a row

You and Glorfindel Included