What is with the Chinese (?) invasion of CC. Is it hacking?
Wondered the same thing!
I tried to flag some of them last night but did it too quickly and my account was temporarily blocked for spamming! Sent a PM to one of the MODs this morning. I’m wondering if this might be a long standing problem that we never saw because fallenchemist was so on the ball? Surely there must be someway to block Asian character posts altogether.
Looks like we are back to English again. Thanks to whoever cleaned that mess up!
Too much flagging gets you blocked? That’s blaming the messenger!
This has been happening almost every night for the past few weeks, but only started at this pace a few weeks ago. I live in Asia so am awake when the posts occur and report them; I wish I had mod privileges and could just zap them as they happen! I Google-translated the recent batch and it is advertising for falsified educational credentials. It seems there could be simple ways to thwart it–by auto rejection of non-English postings as suggested above, or even by instituting a lag time before a new account can post to the site.
@3scoutsmom, thanks for reporting the posts. I’m not sure what happened with your account. I can look at your history and no moderator or administrator blocked or banned you. It would have shown up even if it had been reversed. So that’s weird.
This is a new problem, the last month or so. We asked if the website hosts could block a foreign language, but they said they can’t because it would mean blocking it on ALL their websites. Some sites are OK with foreign languages, so that’s not possible. 
@CCAdminSorin, @RogerDooley have been flagged about the problem.
PLEASE NOTE: Moderators would appreciate it if you would report each spam account only ONCE. When we get a report, we look at the poster’s history and can delete all of his/her posts at once. We have to act on every report we receive, so multiple reports on the same account mean extra time and work for us. Thanks!!
@TomSrOfBoston it wasn’t that it was too much, just too fast. Evidently a flag counts as a post and it’s one way to limit machines from auto posting to message boards. It’s just ironic that I was trying to report all these as fast as I could because there were just some darn many of them that I got blocked for spamming…
Huh, we don’t have that posting limitation anymore - it’s something we’ve asked for but it hasn’t happened.
Thanks for the info @MaineLonghorn good to know we should not flag every post! The block on my account was automated and had a countdown timer stating how long I had to wait before I could post again. It wasn’t something a mod had to do or undo. It’s a safeguard built into the software. I understand it and am not complaining, it’s just ironic.
@3scoutsmom, that’s exciting! That is definitely new. I didn’t think you were complaining, I was just trying to figure out what was going on. Timers don’t apply to moderators, so we didn’t know about this one. 
The Chinese spam has taken a new tactic: right now the spam is coming in under a different account name for each individual post so that a moderator cannot delete a string of spam posts under a single account name.
Yep, it’s frustrating. Fortunately, at least one moderator usually responds pretty quickly to reports, so we appreciate everyone’s help. They often use different IP addresses, too. Very tricky.
I wonder what the poster is saying? LOL Is it a legitimate inquiry or something obscene?
I think it’s some sort of commercial advertisement. Classic spam:, “we’ll help you apply to X college” Targeted to Mainland Chinese looking to apply to US/Canadian/Australian/UK colleges
Yes, Google translated one of the posts for me. Nothing obscene, just advertising.
I really wonder if it’s worth their effort. Do you think there are that many students from mainland China on CC? If they are savvy enough to be on CC I’d think they’d be astute enough not to fall for a scammer.
People and companies who invest in spamming as a primary source of advertising are casting a wide net. Either they have bots doing it or lowly paid people/subcontractors doing it.
They’re scooping the kitty litter box and they know it. Who actually would buy services from a company like that? Someone does. Sad, isn’t it?
I suppose if I REALLY needed some knock off ED pills or Hermes purses or want to meet hot singles in my area or touch base with that Nigerian finance minister who really wants my help, I could easily open my spam folder… hahahah
Want to read some pushbacks on spammers? Funny stuff. Don’t spit take on your monitor or phone! you’ve been warned!
I found this on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spambot
Forum spambots surf the web, looking for guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums, and other types of web forms that it can then use to submit bogus content. These often use OCR technology to bypass CAPTCHAs. Some spam messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of target marketing or even phishing, making it hard to tell real posts from the bot generated ones. Other spam messages are not meant to be read by humans, but are instead posted to increase the number of hyperlinks to a particular web site, to boost its search engine ranking.
The site is not making a poster wait 300 seconds if they post too many posts (which apparently includes reports to the mods of spam posts). So if this was an attempt to stop the spamming, its consequence is that its blocking us from reporting.