Official Report Thread

[JoJo]

I've been flagging the posts they've been making as from "spam bots" with the report button. Is that less effective these days than listing out the names here?

On the contrary, flagging posts with the report button is more effective actually since the report queue is the first thing I see when I log into the site. Appreciate how quickly you guys often pick up on them.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Me thinks JoJo closing the door a bit might have been a good call

 

[Drathnoxis]

View attachment 13064

Me thinks JoJo closing the door a bit might have been a good call

It's been like that for years, I think I made a thread about it once.

 

[Chimpzy]

Most of those are probably just spiders crawling the site for SEO or maybe data to feed into LLMs.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

It's been like that for years, I think I made a thread about it once.

Hah, well, goes to show how much I pay attention. Guess the bot thing was on my mind and suddenly I tuned back in

 

[BrawlMan]

@SarahPalin is spamming like crazy in the video game section.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

@SarahPalin is spamming like crazy in the video game section.

That's a sentence I never thought I'd hear.

 

[Thaluikhain]

She's up to 40 posts now, dunno if that's a record, but a lot more than a single spammer would do in the old days.

 

[JoJo]

She's up to 40 posts now, dunno if that's a record, but a lot more than a single spammer would do in the old days.

I've seen one bot which managed 125 posts. It's definitely a new breed of them.

 

[Chimpzy]

Have you lads seen the front page of the Escapist proper lately? Meiam had already pointed this out in General Gaming News, but a couple days after the Switch 2 reveal the site stopped updating for like a week. No news, no editorials, nothing.

Then it started updating again some days ago, but the content is all codes and guides for free shit in Roblox and other stuff I've never heard of but am assuming is other f2p games. All 'written' by 'people' with Eastern-European names, the parentheses because these articles have strong whiffs of being LLM generated, but they also kinda resemble the kind of stuff the forum bots spam. It's almost like those bots also got to the front page.

Now, I'm not quite sure the Escapist proper wasn't already an AI slop content farm with few if any actual people involved, but this is just ... weird.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Have you lads seen the front page of the Escapist proper lately? Meiam had already pointed this out in General Gaming News, but a couple days after the Switch 2 reveal the site stopped updating for like a week. No news, no editorials, nothing.

Then it started updating again some days ago, but the content is all codes and guides for free shit in Roblox and other stuff I've never heard of but am assuming is other f2p games. All 'written' by 'people' with Eastern-European names, the parentheses because these articles have strong whiffs of being LLM generated, but they also kinda resemble the kind of stuff the forum bots spam. It's almost like those bots also got to the front page.

Now, I'm not quite sure the Escapist proper wasn't already an AI slop content farm with few if any actual people involved, but this is just ... weird.

A couple weeks back I noticed a new post near the bottom of the forum listing and it seemed kind of spammy and was by a new user so I was about to report it, turns out it was in a new sub forum called Escapist Website Content and was official content.

I don't know how long it's been that way, I haven't looked at the Escapist website proper since V2 was created.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Who needs editing? Too bad it wasn't posted by an Aaron (or aAron in this case).

Have you lads seen the front page of the Escapist proper lately? Meiam had already pointed this out in General Gaming News, but a couple days after the Switch 2 reveal the site stopped updating for like a week. No news, no editorials, nothing.

Then it started updating again some days ago, but the content is all codes and guides for free shit in Roblox and other stuff I've never heard of but am assuming is other f2p games. All 'written' by 'people' with Eastern-European names, the parentheses because these articles have strong whiffs of being LLM generated, but they also kinda resemble the kind of stuff the forum bots spam. It's almost like those bots also got to the front page.

Now, I'm not quite sure the Escapist proper wasn't already an AI slop content farm with few if any actual people involved, but this is just ... weird.

Not sure if you've seen it yet, but if you haven't... check this shit out at the top of the page.



It's got its own section at the landing page. Give it a click, and you find exactly the same thing you noted, and at a frequency of 1-3 articles every hour.

Guys, I think we got sold out

 

[Chimpzy]

Guys, I think we got sold out

Well, not the first time, I guess. And so long as it keeps the lights on, I don't particularly care what the main site does.

 

[Worgen]

Well, not the first time, I guess. And so long as it keeps the lights on, I don't particularly care what the main site does.

I'm surprised the forums are still going, especially if the main sites been sold again and is just doing slop content. Seems like keeping the forums going would be more expensive then not.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I'm surprised the forums are still going, especially if the main sites been sold again and is just doing slop content. Seems like keeping the forums going would be more expensive then not.

Yeah, I expect that suddenly everything will go down without warning, and being down, nobody will be told why.

 

[Worgen]

Yeah, I expect that suddenly everything will go down without warning, and being down, nobody will be told why.

Sounds annoyingly plausible. The only thing that might save it is that somehow the forums are still going.

 

[meiam]

I think this forum is the website equivalent of employee who get lost in a company, like after a merge their full department get fired but not them and they just keep cashing check without anyone giving them work. We've just been forgotten.

I wonder how much money it would cost to rent a small sliver of a server and just run a forum like this, its probably pretty cheap I'd assume, so we're probably not even really denting the bottom line.

I am however wondering if all the traffic for the website is just bots at this point, death internet theory and all. Maybe we should be nicer when they peak into the forum, they might be the only reason the light are still on.

Dunno if second wind is working out fine on their side, but the website might be cheap enough at this point that they could just buy it?

 

[Chimpzy]

I dont think the site got sold, and is still owned by Gamurs. I think maybe this new Roblox focus is meant to farm SEO and drive traffic to this new Roblox wiki Gamurs apprently launched recently.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I think the forum sticking around has to do with SEO. Pretty sure that's the reason they bothered migrating all the old posts over in the first place.