I’ve noticed a lot of old threads popping up, some from before the transition, but the most recent post is old; no new post.
Is there a bad spammer going around the Boards?
All day some of the “suggested topics” have been months old.
Bad as in evil, or bad as in incompetent? [Or maybe both]
This has been happening to me all day also.
When we transitioned from vBulletin to Discourse, there were a bunch of spam posts that had been deleted that did not port over properly during the database conversion, so a bunch of old spam posts ended up becoming visible again. Most people didn’t notice them unless an old thread containing one of these spam posts happened to be bumped, and then we would just delete the spam post again and all was good.
Today the Discourse folks went through the entire database for us and cleared out all of those old spam posts that weren’t properly deleted during the transition.
We ended up with a few thousand flagged posts in our moderator review queue, but fortunately the Discourse folks fixed all of that for us fairly quickly.
There’s that, but I’ve also been seeing old threads in the “New Posts” section, with no recent post. I’ve always assumed that such a thread was revived by a spammer whose post got wished to the cornfield.
If we deleted a spammer in the old vBulletin system, the entire thread would sink back into the depths from which it came and would not show any new activity. Discourse works differently, and will show the thread as having recent activity, even though the activity (spam) has been deleted.
So yes, your assumption is usually correct. Someone went into the cornfield.
Aren’t all spammers bad?
I eagerly await the good spammers that might grace the board with their presence.
Yep, like when someone says, “I have bad diarrhea” so you realize it isn’t the good diarrhea.
The good diarrhea is the kind that lets you make it to the toilet.
Is being hit by a bad spammer better or worse than being hit by a smooth criminal?
Do the threads get locked, or are you just letting them sink again unless something kicks off?
It depends on whether or not Annie is okay.
In most cases we do not lock the threads. We just let them go as-is.
So you were spammed? 
Still quite a few spam posts survived the migration (somehow…) but I am working the list as we speak.
https://boards.straightdope.com/search?q=%22spam%20reported%22%20%40running_coach
Holy cow! running_coach reported all of that?! They should just give him the zapper tool.
Thanks running_coach, codinghorror and the Discourse team for keeping us spam free.
@codinghorror mentioned that there is a moderator option to reset the bump date. Perhaps the mods should routinely do that when deleting spam?
