Comment on Automatically hiding spam works

  1. 898700 (ghostwriter) Fri 24 Nov 2017 02:43AM UTC

    Can we see what a spam work looks like? I'm curious, as I haven't seen any AO3 post that wasn't a fic, even if I read about five AO3 fish a day...

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    1. AnonEhouse Fri 24 Nov 2017 03:17AM UTC

      Stark Evolution in action

      They vary, but the current spammers (I've seen and reported a LOT) are all about Live Streaming Sporting Events, they put them in real fandoms, apparently selected at random, so I found them by searching recently posted works without sorting by fandom.

      The works I've seen have all been the same- there's a couple of sentences listing a sporting event and urging you to live stream it, repeated enough times to make up a paragraph or more.

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      1. Byrdie Sun 03 Dec 2017 09:07PM UTC

        Yeah, those wankers are back again at it today. Just saw at least two identical "stories" on the New Works page. Hope nobody clicks on any of their links or goes to the pages they mention, because those look like piracy/scam artist sites to me and you could end up with malware or the gods know what going wrong if you fall for their line.

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