How are so many spam bots getting though?

something needs to be done

I think I will come back when this all dies down

I don’t have enough moderation powers to block them. I tried blocking keywords and then they started using other Unicode characters, so I gave up on that. I also don’t think I can prevent new users from registering.

It’s a losing battle right now so I stopped banning them. For now, yeah, it’s gonna be a hot mess.

It’s happened in other forums powered by the same software. Maybe it’s an exploit through the Google sign-in feature?