To the best of your knowledge, has this board ever been the victim of Russian influence?
We’re all still in deep cover.
Bots don’t tend to complete their registrations. The spammers that get through are doing a lot of work by hand (they seem to be very fond of CTRL-C / CTRL-V).
As for Russian-influenced posters, it wouldn’t surprise me, but we have never positively identified anyone as such.
The Russians are known to use social media to spread distrust of the U.S. government, so making disparaging remarks about both Republicans and Democrats would be within their normal operating range. Democrats also use social media to disparage Republicans and Republicans do the same to Democrats.
None of these types of posters would stick around for any length of time, so what we would be looking for are drive-by posters who post from anonymizing hosting sites. We get plenty of those. Socks and trolls are also often drive-by posters who post from anonymizing hosting sites. We currently don’t have any method for separating out Russians from anyone else posting from a hosting site. As long as they post within the rules, we don’t investigate any further.
How would we know?
Such people* are often very heavy handed and obvious. When somebody never shows up except to post copy-and-pasted screeds from some known propaganda outlet it becomes pretty obvious why they are there.
- By no means just Russians. I suppose it’s because if you are hiring large numbers of people for a widepread propaganda campaign you can’t realistically hire only the people who are good at it.
Do a post search for "Russian handler.` You should find some examples.
Ask them. If they say “nyet, comerade,” then we have our answer.
There were a couple Bernie bros copying and pasting the newest Kremlin hit piece on Hillary for a while. However, I am almost certain they didn’t know where the fake news originated.
We’ve had spam bots from that corner of the world … probably still do but our moderators are ever vigilant, thanks be.
Nyet, comrade.
Also, good user name / thread title combo.
The mods here are certainly more effective than those elsewhere - Quora in particular comes to mind.
Thanks, mods!
Молчи, товарищ.
Maybe one of the registration questions should be “Who won the 1952 World Series?”
Let me guess-- Under the Asimovian theory that the real Americans would all say “I dunno”, but that the Russians would think that it’s something that Americans would be expected to know and look it up?
And to think, it’s only taken 13 years for me to regret my choice of username.
The Patriots. 
I once read somewhere that during WW2 the Germans sent some spies to England, but that their idea of what an Englishman was supposed to look and act like was heavily influenced by PG Wodehouse literature, with the result that they greatly overdid it on the stereotypes and were easily exposed.
IIRC, we used to get hit by DOS attacks from hackers fairly frequently.
At least that’s what TPTB* wanted* us to believe when the servers went down.
:dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious:
Oh, no! I’m a kraut!