@truckerDave :-
We had the same problem over at BleepingComputer. I joined the staff there at the beginning of 2020; when COVID kicked in & the first 'lock-downs' began, we were hit by an absolute tsunami of the stuff. There's a staff of 10 mods over there, two Globals, and an Admin.....and then there's "the guv'nor" - the site's founder in 2004, Lawrence Abrams (known as 'Grinler' on the forums).
The crap was coming in faster than all of us together could deal with it. A lot of it had to be automated, because I don't know of anyone capable of posting that many different posts in dozens of different sub-forums more or less simultaneously...
Eventually, the "guvnor" - himself a talented coder, and a well-known figure in the InfoSec community - came up with a bunch of scripts that gave us some much-needed tools to deal with all this spam. We managed to get on top of it, and stayed on top....thanks to those tools. If it weren't for them, I reckon the site would have gone under long ago.
@KGIII :-
The "call for support" stuff is in fact one of the most common this last few years. One of the bots Grinler built - SpamBot - is 'trained' by us regularly giving it new variations to learn. The trouble with the "call for support" stuff is that the spammer only has to write the title slightly differently, and it slips past SpamBot's 'detector'.
There's never any links with these. Just the number, repeated at least a dozen different ways in the body of the post itself.....which is almost impossible to automate against, so the 10 of us work together in tandem with SpamBot. We usually win......but it IS an ongoing battle.
Mike.
