Many of our readers have highlighted and complained about the increased spam 'likes' and 'comments' on the Disqus commenting platform that are clearly spam and/or hackers in action.
In recent years the web has experienced a massive increase in hacking with a myriad of endgames, the main one to defraud you of your hard-earned money while creating an online landscape that is ripe for cultivating spam and encourages all kinds of illicit activities.
As victims of a costly Facebook hack/hijack and now, separately, Disqus is clearly fighting a cyberwar to keep their much used commenting platform devoid of spammers and hackers.
Clearly, it is raging as they have been made aware of the malice since it became prevalent in the GRANDPRIX247 comments earlier this month, and confirmed by all publishers we approached who use Disqus as a problem for them too.
It's a system-wide attack and not GP247 specific, that persists across the platform.
After reporting the matter on 9 February, here is the feedback from Disqus regarding the inappropriate 'likes' and 'comments' made by the spammers/hackers:
- February 14: Thank you for your continued efforts here. I understand how frustrating this must be. Our team recently made some adjustments in our system which should hopefully help catch and filter these accounts a bit more easily.
Please let us know if you have any additional questions. - February 15: In situations like this, you may want to disable the Guest Commenting feature, at least temporarily. Generally, these accounts will lose interest in your site once they find they can no longer post anonymously.
The problem we have with that 'solution' is that the Guest posts option has always been turned off! And today we got to the bottom of the situation which sounds very much like a cyberwar way beyond our pay grade!
- February 23: Thanks for reaching out about this issue.
In early February 2022, Disqus released spam detection improvements that significantly limited the ability to generate comment spam. Spammers have since switched to a voting method in an attempt to bring attention to their user-profiles and associated external links.
Our team is working to take bulk action on the accounts involved in upvote spam, including removing these votes from discussion threads. We've deleted 5k accounts, and have already located another 10k accounts for targeted removal. We are also focused on closing any paths being used by these accounts for this Spam pattern.
On behalf of the team, I apologize for the disruption to your community. I can assure you we are taking this new behaviour seriously, and are committed to addressing spam in all forms across our network.
It has to be added that Disqus support people have been attentive, generally quick and exuding true concern that this cancer eats into their comment system.
We responded by offering we unite to fight this scourge with our GP247 community as a case study for them to tap into as the feedback from our readers is passed on to them which is sure to help them in this cyberbattle.
So, with that in mind, please feel free to provide feedback/questions/advice in the comments below, a good thing would be to detail briefly your experience with Disqus, if and when you have time.
I trust you understand that making your experience on GP247 is our number one priority. Thank you for your understanding and support.
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