Reaching out to The Piazza for aid?

[doctornecrotic]

Years ago, that forum dealt with bot flood problems like with that (well before the flood of AI generated accounts and easier techniques though). To my awareness, there hasn't been anything massive since (besides outside bot attacks trying to scrape the forums). Would it be worth reaching out to one of the admins from there for preventative tips or ideas?

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

Why not? Sounds like a good idea.

[Big Mac]

Years ago, that forum dealt with bot flood problems like with that (well before the flood of AI generated accounts and easier techniques though). To my awareness, there hasn't been anything massive since (besides outside bot attacks trying to scrape the forums). Would it be worth reaching out to one of the admins from there for preventative tips or ideas?

Hi. I've been the administrator of The Piazza since 2017 (the original administrator was Ashtagon).

Spammers and bots are a cancer that threatens not just one roleplaying community, but all of our communities, so I would be more than happy to help The Fraternity of Shadows and Café de Nuit, in any way I can.

I'm not sure what the exact issue here, and for security reasons it is probably best not to discuss exactly what the problem at Café de Nuit is. (There are companies that sell "search engine optimisation" software that targets the software that both Café de Nuit and The Piazza runs on and they hire experts to search for weaknesses in the system that they can exploit. They also hire people who do penetration testing on various websites, so that they can add your URL to the list of URLs that they market to spammers who buy their software. They may well be monitoring this topic, and even if they are not monitoring the topic now, if you block their access, they may get a human to come and try to figure out what you are doing.)

The other thing that doctornecotic mentioned was the Bot assault on The Piazza 28-30 August 2024 which was carried out by Tencent (yes the same Tencent that has shares in Larian Studios). I believe that was done because they are advertising some sort of new-better-alternative to Chat GPT to angel investors and they need to harvest as many answers to questions about D&D as possible in order to train their AI model. We currently are under a second attack: Bot Assault at The Piazza: 18 July 2025 and ongoing. That is a different type of bot attack. I am certain that this sort of bot attack has been carried out on multiple D&D fansites (and other similar fansites). Even if it does not render forums unusable or knock non-forum websites offline, it will eat up your monthly bandwidth and make your hosting company try to push you into a more expensive hosting plan.

I am not the only administrator at The Piazza and I did not do all of the stuff that blocked the spambots and AI harvesting bots myself, but if your administrators want to reach out to me, I have a hidden community where we can do voicechat and/or screensharing that I only allow forum staff from friendly RPG communities into. (I can also give general advice via PMs on the Café de Nuit forum system, if you would rather talk here.)

[Joël of the FoS]

Good luck with that!

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Hi Big Mac, thanks for the commiseration and advice. I'm the "tech guy" of our group, for the most part, trying to fight the good fight. But I have very little time these days to work on the site. I'd be happy to connect with you and your admins. please feel free to PM or email me with details.

[doctornecrotic]

One of the other moderator on the Piazza mentioned something added to the forum software that took care of most of the issues. If that could be found and applied, that should solve a lot of this.

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

Hi Big Mac, thanks for the commiseration and advice. I'm the "tech guy" of our group, for the most part, trying to fight the good fight. But I have very little time these days to work on the site. I'd be happy to connect with you and your admins. please feel free to PM or email me with details.

I also don't have a lot of time these days, but I would like to be looped in on this too.