[VyseofArcadia]

Is there a name for this phenomenon? It's sort of like the dark forest, but not exactly. As soon as a free service becomes discovered, it is immediately swamped by scammers and spammers.

Many many years ago I ran a small forum for a small webcomic, and one day it was just full of low effort scams and spam. For an audience of, I dunno, a dozen people? I just shut the whole thing down because it wasn't worth our time to do anything about it.

We just can't have nice things, and if you run across something that is actually nice, make sure to thank whoever runs it for all their behind the scenes effort to deal with the scumbags that clog everything, and I mean everything, up with s(p|c)am.

[dhosek]

I had a similar thing happen with a mediawiki site that I run. There was some “shrinkwrap” software behind the abuse, though, and a trivial capcha on account creation was sufficient to turn the abuse from a flood into a manageable trickle (I haven’t had to deal with spam since December, and when I do get spamming, it’s typically happening no more than once a month).