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kescusay@lemmy.world

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META: Banning Townflex (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by kescusay@lemmy.world to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey everyone, just a quick heads-up. This community has been getting flooded with content from a site called "Townflex" that looks like it just republishes stories from elsewhere. I'm provisionally banning the site, because it's difficult to assess their credibility, and the sheer flood of posts from it were beginning to look like site promotion - i.e., spam. Over the next few weeks, I'll work on a bot to automatically remove submissions from the site.

If you've got a good reason for me to rethink this policy, please let me know below.

top 8 comments

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[–] DarkSirrush@piefed.ca 48 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

If it helps, I have not seen a single one of those posts, which means its likely being posted by an account with the bot flag.

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 28 points 3 weeks ago

I purged them from the last few days.

[–] papalonian@lemmy.world 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I have bot posts enabled and only see one from 4 days ago. The posts may have been purged.

[–] DarkSirrush@piefed.ca 10 points 3 weeks ago

I scroll piefed quite a lot, so if they weren't a bot I would likely have noticed the flood as it happened.

[–] Blackfeathr@lemmy.world 32 points 3 weeks ago

Thank you so much!

Townflex is essentially a clickbait ad-riddled site with a cheap thin veneer of a few news articles over it.

[–] MyBrainHurts@piefed.ca 14 points 3 weeks ago

Thanks for the quality modding and the heads up!

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 3 weeks ago

Good, I wanna say I saw this website pop up a lot when I found bot user accounts.

I'll point to this post as a suggestion for other forums, if I see similar patterns.

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 weeks ago

I saw a few of them. Good riddance.