Hi folks. The Car Talk Community has been attacked by spammers. We first found out about it from member reports. We’re holding off on deleting the spam one post at a time for now, but we’ll take that step soon if a batch delete is not practical. Please be patient. Thanks
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@GorehamJ Thanks for posting this. And thanks to all who flagged the issue.
We are working on it currently. The bots are just getting more savvy day by day…
Again, thanks for flagging everyone!
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Looks like you were successful!
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Thanks John and Julie. It’s easy to see real posts now.
Hi all,
Thank you again for your help identifying and flagging the issue. It was not pretty, but we handled it. The bots started hitting the site right around 12am pacific standard time. They had hours to do their thing before we were even awake… jerks. They’d also figured out how to verify their new accounts, which is a new thing they’ve not been able to do before.
Thanks to you all for flagging and our awesome tech team for handling this.
Very thankful for you all.
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Hello Julie. When I first signed up for this community things were so smooth and problem-free. Now, I can’t say the same for now as I can’t even read comments in peace because of the screen jumping all over the place due to the ads.
I’m using an iPhone and safari browser. The members on this site suggested that I use a different browser but why has CarTalk become a problem for safari l users ?
Then there is the repeated redirecting to malicious websites such as virusblocker.life, Trojanwall and currently cyber ( whatnot ) ?
The community is a lovely place. The members are helpful and engaging. The mods are fantastic. This is why I haven’t gone elsewhere. The site’s functionality, however, definitely needs addressing.
Hi there. We are very aware of the nature of the current site. Believe it or not, we are working on updating it. The site has been going since the beginning of time. So, it is very old, and a full replacement of the site would be very expensive and would require that we create a pay wall, and start charging for usage.
Car Talk is historically a completely free resource. So, we are trying to remain completely free for you, and all our other users.
This means that the work we do is often slow and deliberate.
The ads keep the lights on, and allow us to remain a free resource for all.
It is a balancing act.
I’ve been seeing your reports of being directed to a malicious site. That isn’t happened to others, or myself. There may be some sort of virus within your system. I’m not sure. But we can’t recreate the issue on our end.
I’m sorry your frustrated. I’d love to be able to walk into a bunch of money and be able to redo the whole community. That just isn’t feasible at this moment. But we are doing our best.
Thanks,
Julie
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Unfortunately not all browsers are the same and there are some subtle differences that allow one browser to work for one URL, but other browsers have problems. 15 years ago this was a real problem. When creating web applications we had to determine what browser the user was using and there were different code paths the URL would take depending on what browser was being used. Things have gotten considerably better since then, but still not perfect.
For the last 2 years the consensus on this forum has been that an ad blocker is necessary to participate here. The ads cause interference when trying to read posts.
Generating revenue didn’t seem to be a priority for the Car Talk staff, how can they sell advertising when everyone is using an ad blocker? The use of ad blockers has often been promoted here.
Some members have been shamed for not using an ad blocker, there have been several treads on the topic. The majority of your members don’t share the same revenue plan as the staff, your members are selling DuckDuckGo.
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When I was still using Internet Explorer, the website for my Medicare Advantage company worked very poorly, with the result that healthcare provider searches on that site produced nonsensical results.
That was the reason why I switched to Chrome. The improvement was nothing short of amazing!
IE (Internet Explorer) was one of the WORSE offenders of NOT following the World Wide Web (WWW) standard which Microsoft was a participant in. Firefox (Mozilla) was far more compatible. It was so bad that many small companies who didn’t have the knowledge or to man power to do so only designed the web pages for one (and only one) Browser. If you used the internet even 5 years ago you may have come across a URL that said it’s only compatible with IE or Firefox. Before working in Telecom industry I was doing software consulting building applications and Web applications for the insurance industry. Our URLs (Web Pages) had to work with ALL browsers. It wasn’t too difficult, but time consuming and a lot of extra code and testing. And it wasn’t just a difference between IE and Firefox - there were incompatibility issues between different versions of IE or Firefox. And if there was ever a new version of a Browser - we had to quickly code in a new solution. About 10 years ago the Browser companies started to really adhere to the standards and this made developers job a lot easier and the internet more stable.
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If we keep bringing up ad blockers the advertisers might decide to pull their advertising or at least demand lower cost. I’d appreciate it we could limit this discussion to specific instances where someone asks about it. If additional discussion seems needed maybe PMs are a better way to handle it.
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I guess I missed out on the spam attack but this is becoming more of an issue as bots and AI advance. The nice thing about old fashioned web forums like this one vs. Facebook is that the admins have far better control over this. Facebook groups are always under attack and the admins commonly explain how their hands have basically been tied by the platform. I really feel this is deliberate as all the clicks and engagement these scam posts bring makes Meta/Facebook’s numbers look better to advertisers. Also, some of these bad actors are actively paying Facebook to spread their nonsense.
I am finding myself more and more going away from using Facebook for anything serious. I am on several web forums like this one for various topics such as power equipment, power tools, and such. The posts are far more informative, there is a lot less drama, and spam than on Facebook. I know that Facebook is doing better than ever from an economic sense when you look at their stock price but I feel this and other policies will eventually come back to bite them. Most of my feed is sponsored scam posts or junk that FB feels I should see including fake AI slop photos, generated quotes, and such.
Thanks for bringing this under control. I didn’t even know it had happened as I haven’t been on in a while.
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Additionally, when I have reported the posting of pornography and suggestions of outright violence to Facebook’s mods, the response is always, “this doesn’t violate Facebook’s terms of service”. So, I no longer waste my time by reporting nasty stuff to the powers-that-be at FB.
I know this all too well. Basically if FB actually did something it would cut into their bottom line. Like you I have reported countless ads and posts to FB. These range from the “Like and share” clickbait junk to sponsored scams, blatant pornography, sites paying to sell stolen credit card numbers, dangerous illicit drugs, and so on. The best you can do is leave a nasty review so that will hopefully warn others. I have some written up for each category that I just copy and paste into the review field.
I seem to be getting a lot of illegal gambling sites now that are just scams trying to get me. I don’t even gamble, have no interest, and leave a bad review 100% of the time so don’t know why they don’t stop. Facebook is just maddening. Old style web forums are where it is if you ask me.