Occasional weird spam posts by otherwise (seemingly) legitimate users? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30801261

I'm noticing a pattern starting to develop in the community I mod (just barely -- it's only happened 3 times so far) where a user that posts a fairly large amount of relevant content occasionally posts weird spam with a title of alternating letter nonsense (e.g. "zazaz" or "sdsdsds") and a link that goes to some random domain that serves nothing but a default 404 error (as in the domain is registered and there's a server responding to requests, but there's no content for it to serve).

I suppose it could just be bad behavior on the part of said users, but it feels more like a bug or their account getting hijacked or something. Anybody have any insight?

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[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I saw this a while ago and I believe the consensus was that these users are using some borked client to post to Lemmy that does not understand you can create a text post with no associated link or image. I.e. badly behaved apps make the link/image field mandatory (like how reddit works) when this is not actually the case. So they have to put something in that box to make the app happy and allow them to post.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

But both the title and the link are nonsense (and the post body is empty). If the posts were only half-nonsense I probably would've guessed the explanation you just gave and not bothered to ask about it.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

If the content is nonsense too then yeah, I have no idea.

this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025

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