Gotta tear down the old to make room for the new, such is the way of the world. The most successful alien invasions in film slot themselves in the transition phase, from the few I've seen.

Hm... So it probably wasn't kind of me to obliterate all of them in one fell swoop, was it? 🤷‍♂️ 😬

Also told HelpBot to kick them out if he sees them again. Guess I'm not very accommodating. 😅

Definitely on to something here. These extraterrestrials dialed the correct site, network, planet, century and universe - a minor miscalculation in the means of communication doesn't detract much from such a miraculous feat.

They must be looking for Jeb! That’s got to be it.

They're all soy proonies, ronbop sabonnons and union thuncorses. What language is that, other than the creator mayhap only one of jeb's visions could tell.

There’s a bit. I’m pretty certain I know what they all are though. I think there are only a couple of bots that have had us in their sites for a while. Might need to just extend that to stop users from being created as well. 🤷‍♂️

Fun thought: The infinite monkey theorem might apply to these usernames' letter avatars (though there might only be a couple monkeys in this case).

I have wondered as well. At first thought it was some attack, but then noticed the spread over a week. Any logging for such replies?

I hadn’t noticed. What do they get from making so many useless users? I’m assuming those are each tied to a spam post/reply that got shut down, but jeez.

Oh well, always nice to discover features, old or new.

It wasn't a cakewalk, I can tell you that much. The fellow's stark raving mad & self centered, took years to be convinced I wasn't some scammer attempting to abscond with his belongings.

Thanks.

Have you noticed the past week's surge of registrations? Looks like a particularly tenacious bot.
https://help-qa.com/users

How did you add yourself as a friend? 🤔

🎂 Happy early Birthday. 😄

Nope! That’s original with the site. 😉

Oh, is the "users who loved this reply" part of the latest update as well, or had I missed it? That's always been a point of uncertainty.

Ohh. Very interesting.
That must actually have to do with the autocomplete when typing for an emoji or tag. Interesting. I’ll figure out a fix. 😊

Thanks for the report!

Oh, jolly good. Thought I'd failed some perception check and it had fallen into the sep field for months or summat.

By undo queue I meant the ctrl+Z key combo, rather than some 'solid' interface. I'm okay with the positioning either way.

Demo:
http://i65.tinypic.com/125ke9c.jpg

I added that minutes ago. 😂
Too quick for me!

Wasn’t aware of Chrome’s undo queue? I don’t see anything on mine. It will probably be better floating above the field rather than stretching and sitting inside, huh?

Also seems to struggle on mobile, but I ran out of free time. 😅

Just noticed the tagging interface - nice touch. It's a tad dismissive of chrome's undo queue, but no biggie.

One should like to think so, huh.
But then reality comes along and says "Nope, we have fines against that and you better take it apart."

For your office though, definitely. A miniature helpbot, mayhap lego, oughtn't be too much trouble to build, and is a nice conversation piece even if explaining xis origin isn't as desirable.

But by being made from such basic materials, wouldn’t it be quite simple to reconstruct basically anywhere? 😏

Might need one for my office...

Such is reality - tight constraints, low returns.
Chris yates' helpbot comprised such plain materials insomuch as to be defined more as a statue than robot. Xe would not make the trip intact ere reaching the airport.
But then, in the virtual realm, xis existence is the outcome of collective imagination & belief.

Thank you! 😄

😢 Was afraid they were just edited.

I was really hoping whoever built the original just strategically placed him in places for sneaky shots. 😄 I think I purposely didn't look too closely at the images in case I discovered that.

Ahoy.

Glad you've enjoyed them - I'm actually an undercover master artist in my spare time!
Or at least I would be had not all my spare time been so sparse already betwixt vigilantism and the billionaire lifestyle.

Here they are. https://archive.help-qa.com/posts/515328-it-has...

Do you know the story about the HelpBot sitings you've got on your profile? It's clearly the same, so I'm curious who made that, and why they've taken pictures of it in various places, apparently spreading the images thinly so they're hard to find. 😄

I’m pretty well know for burying an Easter egg or two around. Been thinking about doing some really interesting ones. 😉

Nah, that was just for fun. Some programmers have loved fooling around pretty much anywhere they could inject a bit of shenanigans - easter eggs, research papers, books.

Very nice! Except as of now, we don’t have any asynchronous loads. 🤔

Although I plan to start doing the replies as a post-load to help with the bigger posts.

https://stackoverflow.hewgill.com/questions/182...

Let's be honest- it could use some work either way. 😉

Just kicked the archives. Sorry. Totally forgot yesterday. 😄

Basically, this is where we used to be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlslwdB9Z4g

And this is where we are now:
https://youtu.be/M7nLQpWiy1o?t=31

Notwithstanding the tools' tremendous growth, these spambots pale in comparison. Their goal is still a simple one of getting a link past the automated filters; their nature in ~95% of the cases can be surmised from the title by a human, they don't yet aim for the long cons. Practically everywhere (when no considerable resources are available) either links are disabled or registration required, usually both. This site has the benefit of customisation - mayhap you could opt to display an informative error message whenever an unverified user attempts to post a link, akin to the "too short" check.

Did you kickstart the archive eventually, or is it experiencing some issue?

He does both. Full delete if it’s obviously spam. Other moderation. Those posts are somehow slipping through.
I think the spam is evolving. They post so much I think they are trying different combinations to bypass the filters.

Archive goes down often. Takes a lot from the server to run it so I usually let it stay down for a bit. I’ll kick start it again. 😊

Does xe send such posts to a moderation queue, or have delete authority?

By the way, seems the archive's down.

Thanks for grabbing those. 😊

Need to upgrade HelpBot’s spam detection a bit, it seems.

Mayhap it could actually be beneficial - by filling up the blurb with helpful advice pertaining to the name as a question?

Something like "helpineedmoney" -> Nick's old wall of links.

I know you're not overly fond of hacky solutions, but it's merely a thought.

It’s not exceptionally necessary, but improves the overall experience. Not allowing spaces in usernames is a pretty common concept these days, and helps significantly when it comes to things like tagging or otherwise referring to other users in a sensible fashion. Same with the length- as it is, the current length of usernames can break out of the flow of the page and be awkward to try to refer to another user. If your username is “What should I call myself today?” How should another user refer to you? “Call”? “Myself”? That’s the type of problem it aims to prevent.

Even a very great keyword phrase wouldn’t be really worth it just having it exist because nobody would ever visit that page so Google would notice it but not send people there as it’s clearly not beneficial.

Well, not just popular, but meaningful phrases.

Would it be possible to remove the preclusion of spaces in usernames (and perhaps raise the letter cap), or is that necessary for something in particular? Not just in relation to this topic, but meseems it's relevant to many of the existing users (using _, - or camelcase separators).

You mean making fake accounts with popular words?

Unfortunately doesn’t work quite like that. It works with that one because it’s a very unique word. We’re able to set up key words and descriptions which help us move up. The more times a page is visited (unique visits count much more than repeats, but repeats are still taken into account over time), the higher it shows up.
However, it’s kind of like a point system. We get more points for those words/names/etc. however, if there are other sites with more points with those words, they’ll still show up higher which pushes us down the list and sticks us on lower pages in the results.

It's the top result on alexa's statistics.
Which got me thinking how this could be leveraged, theoretically, unless google actually requires the same person make the account.

Very curious what made you Google that. 😄

It’s a bit of both. The profiles are just pages that contain words. But the words are still matched with our site. Because that’s a very unique “word” Google likely has very few matches to that word outside of our site, so it’s higher on the list.

It seems the site is now the fourth result for googling "hannahminaex".
A little odd, since they only posted once with an unverified account.
Do you think google tracks & elevates people's profile creations in particular (via uniquely identifiable assortment of information), or that it's just matched up the words during regular crawling?

Thanks Yeti!

Interesting. Been trying to figure out what’s been causing the hang ups over the last few days. It started pretty suddenly and as far as I can tell there weren’t any code changes to it.

I’ll look into and see if there is something in that post somehow causing it.

Yo, I think joe's post bugged out - slow load and 404 eventually. Unsure if related to the server dying.

https://help-qa.com/posts/664

Nope! I was up and about. Just hadn't got on to check on everything around here yet. 😉

Hopefully it didn't wake you, this time.

I wasn’t there. 😉

Got notified of some feedback. 😛

Ah, morning. Didn't see you there. :)