[Joseph Coveney]

I also don't see how this keeps out serious spammers, who can easily use a multitude of different accounts.

Your prediction is borne out. But the administrators are going to have to do something. The effect is to render the forum nearly useless.

[Ariel Karlinsky]

Wow! first ~30 pages of the forum are now full of this spam.
Quickly, someone regress the amount of spam on explanatory variables such as time of day, number of spam users, alexa rank etc.! This is a golden opportunity right here
And seriously now, just deleting these posts and banning these users is probably not enough and some filtering or restricting (of users? of messages?) is probably warranted. Even facebook has "can't post so much in so little time" and other forums I frequent require a user to be authorized before he is able to post anything at all. I think these methods will suffice and will not hurt the forum too much (if at all).

[Philip Jones]

The answer involves limiting new threads by time. Multiple accounts can be used, but requires more effort.

[Richard Williams]

Just checked, and I had to go to page 49 to get past the spam! And it is only 6 am in Texas, so the numbers may continue to climb. Lord only knows what the pages would be like after a holiday weekend when nobody is working. We can't be the only board that has problems like this -- how do others solve it or avoid it (other than 24/7 monitoring)?

[Simon Weiss]

Other boards ask a simple question like "Whats 3+3?" or give you a captcha on sign-up. While these are not impossible to solve for bots or spammers they provide a considerable barrier.

[Philip Jones]

I'm just worried I will miss the "Welcome to Stata 15" announcement!

[Daniel Bela]

My two cents: Dear Statacorp admins, please implement a reCAPTCHA before posting. No need to limit the posts per minute etc, nor to solve a CAPTCHA upon registering a username. By now, reCAPTCHA is even possible to be implemented without the need of user interaction at all, which makes the change nearly invisible for us "regular" users, but impossible for spam bots to post stuff.

Regards
Bela

[Richard Williams]

I'm just worried I will miss the "Welcome to Stata 15" announcement!

That was on p. 217. I think it got accidentally deleted when they cleared out all the spam. ;-)

How is this stuff controlled during the daytime? Is there somebody constantly monitoring and deleting? Or do the spam bots take a richly deserved rest?

[Nick Cox]

I was frustrated as anybody else at the spam and am also intrigued at how it is, or is best, tackled.

But I'll counsel caution.

Whoever spammed should be assumed to be capable of reading this thread and I don't even want them to glean a tiny bit of information that could possibly be useful to them in the future That includes any discussion whatsoever on what anybody at StataCorp or the software does or doesn't do.

[Pete Huckelba (StataCorp)]

As most of you are aware, the forum has been the target of a coordinated attack from multiple accounts through multiple IP addresses over the past several days. While we can not go into detail regarding measures to limit the amount of spam posted to the forum, please understand there is a fine line between making the forum accessible to legitimate users while rejecting unwanted content.

Suggestions regarding spam control are appreciated; some suggestions were already implemented and clearly circumvented while other suggestions would involve branching the vendor's code making long term maintenance an issue. Other 'tunables' provided by the software vendor have also been modified and our upstream anti-spam service has received a workout as well.

We greatly appreciate member's patience regarding these unsolicited postings to the forum and hope to have everything back to normal shortly.

-Pete