alt Hacker NewsNot really, if you allow anon posting/editing or have a simple registration form and a login that takes GET you may get hundreds of spam posts per day.( @dang how much is it on hn?)
I ont time forged a hilarious solution. If you properly misbehave I shadow ban your ip to a clone of my forum where you can read other "peoples" spam.
This in it self wasn't all that funny, perhaps a little bit. The funny part was how popular the hidden forum was. They had their viagra threads where they replied with their viagra spam then they read the entire thread of Viagra spam posts and clicked all the links to research their market. The next thread was porn, one with wares, other drugs, hyip etc. I was looking at it grow and thought, this is hilarious, I'm going to prison. To solve the problem I raised unregistered users to admin level. I even made a topic to announce it. Someone said "lol" then my topic was deleted. Whole new experience. It increased traffic dramatically. Before they only had to post every other day, now they had to do it multiple times per day.
A porn guy and a viagra guy would take turns deleting the others posting and reposting their own until they realized they couldn't win and came to a silent agreement to leave both posts up. Until the next guy deleted both ofc
I would much rather host a swarm of bots. They might even listen to the wishes of the website owner? Or perhaps, if you announce giving them admin privileges they too delete the announcement?
I wonder which would generate the longer prison sentence.
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>[...] and thought, this is hilarious, I'm going to prison.
I've only had one moment like this related to a site I was a moderator for back in the 00's. It's genuinely one of the most fascinating feelings, and the one experience I can attribute most of my bad choices as an adult to.
Just laughing as the white hot panic starts to grow and the adrenaline just dumps into your brain.
Legitimately, I spent years chasing that feeling again through various means (drugs, hobbies, skydiving, etc.)
Jesus. What an experience. What percentage of your time did it take moderating this absurd shadow board??!
I ran a message board for a little bit back in 1997 but I didn’t really moderate it and just left it alone. I came back months later and it had somehow become a strange two-topic forum. I assume because somebody had randomly posted about each, a search engine had indexed it and more people searching for each of those topics found it.
It was pretty funny seeing the threads where the two groups talked past each other, confused what the other was talking about.
The first topic was “AOL PUnterz” which as far as I could understand were programs/scripts that could maybe crash somebody else’s aol connection and disconnect them? A pretty leet thing to do I guess when you got in an aol argument.
The other topic was Hanson and their hit song mmmbop.