Seems this is one of the few forums now & again the spam bots get through, & it's always in the middle of the night, you know it straight away through the weird thread titles like, hj, & then starts threads in a foreign language, which looks like in Chinese or Japanese, just reported one posting in the Traction & Rolling Stock section right now.
There's about 20 odd of these threads now in traction and rolling stock. I was wondering if anyone else was aware.
That has been going on every single night for months and months. I remember seeing this over six months ago. Every single time when i view the forum at around 02:00 or 03:00 or 04:00 in the morning i see this.
It is the same thing every time. They normally post about thirty to fifty posts in one night. It is written entirely in some oriental language (Chinese or Japanese or Korean) except for the name of a university which is written in the English language.
Every post is identical except for the name of the university which is different in each of the posts. The universities mentioned are in the, UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and a few other countries. From using Google Translate they seem to be advertising some sort of fake university diplomas and other fake documents to help gain admission to these universities. All the posts seem to contain a contact number for We Chat which i think is some oriental social media site.
I notice that initially the threads seem to just contain two random letters in the title and the content of the posts contain just two random letters too. So you will get something like a post labelled "ab" and then the content of the post will just say "cd" but each thread and each post is a different two random characters. Then a couple minutes later they seem to edit the title and edit the post to all the stuff about the universities written in oriental characters. So i am guessing they are using this method to get around spam filters.
Obviously nobody on an English speaking railway forum is going to be interested in whatever they are offering. Especially when nobody on here can even understand it. So i am guessing it must be bots that are just targeting as many forums as possible. I have similar stuff appear on other forums too. It is a shame there is no way to stop it though. It must get rather annoying for the moderators to have to go through and delete all of that every morning.