RSS Feeds appearing to 'spam' the forum

Good evening everyone,

You may have noticed that we've had an awful lot of posts appearing in batches throughout the day (40-50 at a time) which in turn fills up the 'Latest Posts' block with all of these various, somewhat odd threads.

These posts are appearing automatically from RSS feeds. RSS feeds are essentially news feeds that forums and individuals can 'subscribe' to and then whenever there is some new news on that feed, it is automatically sent out either in full or as a shortened version with a link.

These subscriptions were set a very long time ago (I presume when the forum software changed in 2015) and they are not something that the Admin Team can currently control - not least, because they are being sent in from an external source. We have tagged @Webmaster in on our conversations in the office on this one, to try and get a better understanding and hopefully resolve this problem.

Whilst it certainly felt that our forum was under attack by spammers earlier on today, please be assured that this is not the case. All of the posts in this case were an RSS feed from The Telegraph, and the links within take you to articles on The Telegraph website. I suspect that someone has nudged a desk or something in their offices and awoken a server which has suddenly decided to fire off all of these articles to us. In short, the problem lies with The Telegraph and not us. I have reached out to The Telegraph, but am yet to have a response.

We've done our best to remove all of these posts for now until we get to the bottom of things, and we are very grateful to those who took the time to report them to us in the early stages this morning. We are all watching this situation closely and will remove them as and when we can. There is no need for you to report these to us now as we are monitoring this situation whenever we are online.

Please bear with us whilst we work on this issue.

 

There were 200 of them!

 

There hasn't been any further occurrence today thankfully. We suspect that someone at The Telegraph rebooted a server somewhere and it then started sending out the news links... the net result of that being that we got a couple of years worth withing a matter or hours.

We will monitor things over the weekend, however I am fairly sure we can call this one as 'back to normal'

 

It was all the other admin as I did nothing

 

I am certain we can draw a line under this one now as there has been no recurrence and we are comfortable that it is in all certainty just a case of a server being rebooted at Telegraph Towers.....

For the sake of clarity, these RSS feeds are all news feeds and will almost always contain a link to take you to the new providers website. These are safe (or at least as safe as you going to that same website yourself); with some of these websites, you can log in if you wish to do so (often using Google or Facebook account), this is entirely up to you and is in no way related to GC.

I hope that this gives some reassurance. I will close this thread immediately after posting this, however should you have any questions, please DM any or all of the Admin Team and we will be happy to help.