As some of you may know, there has been a recent influx of spam on Tapastic.
If you thought the great Babaji Invasion of 2015 was bad, this one is much, much worse.
These are some of the things that come with the territory of having an open publishing platform like Tapastic. Early yesterday afternoon, it came to our attention that there were a handful of series that were making their way onto the Fresh section that seemed "suspicious."
Most of these series were linking to streaming sites for illegally pirated movies and/or links to cheat codes for various mobile games.
Why these people chose to run scripts to generate these series on Tapastic is beyond me, but what started off as a handful of series, quickly escalated to 300. This morning 500.
The one reality that I have to face as editor in chief, is that the people that are doing this have much, much more time on their hands than we do.
So far, we've done our best to mitigate the problem by outright deleting these series, and removing the accounts. However, the speed in which we do this is limited and there are going to be times when one of these malicious series pops up on the fresh section, escaping our editorial staff's detection.
And so, I'm asking all of us to keep an eye out for them. Use the report function liberally.
My fear is that, the Fresh section will lose it's functionality if it's clogged with these series, and it gives an overall bad experience to new and returning readers and creators on the site. The Fresh section, admittedly, is not the greatest way to discover new creators and series, and we are working on better mechanics to help surface more series on a regular basis, but at it's current state is very vulnerable to these types of spam attacks. Yesterday night, there was a point where a few pages were comprised only of these spam series.
While we're manually taking care of the problem for now, we are actively working on longer term solutions to help mitigate this problem.
From the great Babaji Invasion of 2015 to the onslaught of the "yet to be coined name for the [ON ' AIR]" spam (I'll open it up to the community to come up with something catchy to call this). It's become quite apparent, that there will always be some type of annoyance we've yet to face on the horizon, but I am incredibly grateful that we have this community with us to face it together. We've gotten so many reports to help us stave off this most recent threat, and it really is going to be a community effort to help each other out.
We get a lot of topics created here on the forum and a lot of e-mails sent to us asking how exactly we've been able to keep the community so nice. There's no real secret sauce to it - it boils down to something really, really simple: everyone here is genuinely nice. And the staff will stop at nothing to help protect it.
I will keep everyone updated on the on going status of events!
all the best,
-Michael from Tapastic