Originally Posted by
smontanaro
Are other forum sites similarly afflicted? If not, why not? Are these nuisance threads being started by new users? If so, how long after signing up are they posting?
Whoever is doing it is remarkably unsophisticated. They appear to be manually creating accounts, posting 5 ads, then
creating another account, in a process that takes hours to post, all in General Cycling. So at dawn, there will be about 2-3 pages of threads, all in order, easy to delete in seconds. You can see how many people have opened them, and it's clear that one or two will have been opened by anyone. That's probably me or one of the other early risers opening the thread to flag it for the mods. After that, they're always gone within the hour.
From a user perspective, at this point it just seems comical, a scammer wasting an entire 8 hour shift to absolutely no effect.