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I have been flagging multiple answers on the board for the last couple of evenings where a 'new' user (with no reputation) has posted either the question, an answer, a selection of comments, or a combination of the previous. It is just a text copy with no attempt to format. I suspect we are beginning to see a deliberate attack on the site.

The problem with these posts is that they mask the real new users whom we want to encourage to participate and learn. It is a waste of time to open a posting and check the participation of a new user to see if they can be encouraged only to discover it is basically a Denial of Service attack (albeit very slow).

I suspect this is the actions of a single person and I wonder if the moderators can check the logs and see if this traffic is coming from the same IP address. And if so, then just block it. And I suggest that the moderators of other stackexchange sites be queried to see this problem is occurring elsewhere.

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    Note that blocking IP addresses, etc., is managed automatically by the back-end, not by the mods. Flagging as spam is the best way to 'inform' this back-end process: it takes account of the number and rate of spam flags.
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Mar 27, 2015 at 6:57
  • This was also my concern in this question.
    – cfr
    Commented Mar 27, 2015 at 16:51
  • At that time of day i am usually sound asleep, but may i ask one thing: Are the user names names or just userNumber?
    – Johannes_B
    Commented Mar 28, 2015 at 15:38
  • @Johannes_B They are userNumber with different numbers each time.
    – R. Schumacher
    Commented Mar 28, 2015 at 18:41

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This happens occasionally. The last such attack was around 1.5 years ago (although it feels like yesterday) and threatened different sites across the entire SE network at different levels of severity. I think the same is happening now, and we might just be a target hit more severely than others.

I suspect the same type of "invasion" is happening, just a little more skilfully; instead of posting watch-NFL-type easy-to-identify nonsensical jibber-jabber, they are now posted a mix-match of question/answer/comments from the site.

With this in mind, we should follow the same procedure as last year: Flag as spam, possibly cast a delete vote, consider down-voting and move on. This too shall pass and perhaps the SE spam filters will be improved to thwart such nincompoops... until they strike again with some other witty wizardry.

The act of dually flagging as spam and down-voting may be discouraged. However, we're a small yet wide-spread enough community that influx of garbage is quite swiftly taken care of by our janitors.

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