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About a week ago, there were some questions on Ask Ubuntu by various users that were totally unrelated to Ubuntu. One was about cooking or something like that.

The same thing happened today with a question about eggs yolks and nonsense which had -6 (6 undervotes) and got locked. But there was a difference. Today's question also involved a link in the bottom.

Is Ask Ubuntu under attack or something? Because these nonsensical questions and their links seem suspicious to me.

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  • Spam is as Spam Does. Flag it as spam, and then don't worry about it. This isn't anything new, and spam is usually short-lived (and goes away quickly thanks to the community flagging it as spam.)
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Mar 23, 2018 at 13:25

2 Answers 2

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The entire Stack Exchange network is under constant attack by spammers. You just happened to visit at an unfortunate time -- these posts are often deleted within minutes if not seconds.

The Charcoal volunteer organization coordinates efforts to respond to spam which gets through the site admins' blocks (which allegedly already stop 90% of the deluge).

Charcoal collects records in a system called Metasmoke -- here are the recent hits for Ask Ubuntu:

https://metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/search?feedback_filter=tp&site=29

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    The one the OP mentions was deleted in seconds. 26 seconds, to be precise.
    – terdon
    Mar 23, 2018 at 12:05
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The post you might be referring to is this. (MS Link)

moreover divided among white and yellow, the amino acids that make up the egg proteins are especially well assimilated thru the human body. in truth, it Lunatrim the idea that has been selected to outline the natural rate of a protein supply.

This post was spam. And there have been 13312 posts caught and 12723 were true positive (i.e, spam). Charcoal volunteers identify spams among them and flag them as such. The votes you saw were downvotes caused by spam flags and possibly from some users.

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    If you search for "Lunatrim" (in Metasmoke, or in Google) you can find some support for the evidence that this was in fact spam. We see from time to time various copy/paste errors where posts which are clearly part of a spam campaign lack the promotional link to the spammer's site.
    – tripleee
    Mar 23, 2018 at 12:11

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