Bots !!

Question, what’s the difference between @-ing andrew (Our Supreme Lord and Overseer) and just.. you know.. using the report post feature?

Its because andrew (Our Supreme Lord and Overseer) (the honourable patron deity and creator of this web community) is only one man, and unless he's appointed other mods behind the scenes, he's the only one running this show.
That and the reporting system is fairly new still? Kinda?
Either way doing both kinda just gives it two avenues to get to where our wonderful site mod/creator/deity can see it when he gets the chance.

Thanks, all. We've been hit pretty hard this week and I'm cleaning them up as I see them; thanks for reporting and tagging me! As a fun fact, I actually shadowban them when I do ban them so they don't actually know they've been banned and can still see their posts (though no one else can) – the shadowbanned users have posted almost 600 times in the past week. I'm using those extra posts to help train some new spam detection code I'm writing.

Question, what’s the difference between @-ing andrew (Our Supreme Lord and Overseer) and just.. you know.. using the report post feature?

The big difference is the report post feature is secured behind my laptop, so I can only see reported posts when I'm working from that laptop. @-mentions I see from my phone and any other computers I'm occasionally checking the forums from, so I can clean things up on the go. When bots post deep in big threads, reporting them works a lot better so I don't have to click through thousands of pages looking for the spam. They're both ultimately the same (other than also trying to delete @andrew (Our Supreme Lord and Overseer) comments where I can), so feel free to do either and/or both! :)

Bot nuked. :+1:

At some point I'll probably want to rework profiles to make it less easy to just set up a spam profile (instead of or in addition to spam forum posts). Not sure the best way to limit it without inconveniencing real users, but I appreciate the heads up in the meantime. :)