Chat Room Flooder
Elis Riebow
A bot which intrudes into a chat room and floods it with a large amount of text. This text appears on the screens of all the participants at the same time. This type of bot effectively carries out a denial of service attack. It is more of a nuisance than a security risk.
I personally agree with the mathematicians, that this is not a good change for the knowledgable about the site topic people who are already on the site since it does not represent the community and the content of the site very well, available options are reduced (chat and meta are not accessible for example), etc. In addition, since it is optimized to attract people who randomly visit the site, it is rather not well suited to attract people who have a good physics knowledge of their own (leaving alone experts), so that I suspect that this change could have contributed to the current flood of very low level questions we actually have.
This is a good place to document a nice SE Data Explorer query I cooked up recently. (This is not a direct answer to the question, but it does provide some useful data to inform decisions.) The query Timeline of posts closed as homework plots the accumulation plot of questions created in the past 3 months (or some other period you specify) which were closed as Off-Topic and were tagged as homework (or some other tag you specify). Currently the data shows a sharp increase in the rate of homework closures at about the start of term (I complained about it in chat here, which also has a graph as of January 20).
Chat room flooding is a form of spam advertisement often employed by automated robots. It is typical to come across such practices in chat rooms, especially the ones associated with large sites, such as AOL. Chat room flooding has long been looked down upon as improper netiquette, and can result in the banning of the bot or user from the room; a report to the user's internet service provider can also be made as a consequence of flooding a chat room.
I have a simple, custom rolled chat here: ( - essentially: ajax chat, php backend, javascript listing of chat messages, logged-in user input only ) that suffers from being able to be spammed. What are some simple systems to prevent spamming of a chat?
Room for the River will reduce high water levels in the Rhine, Meuse, Waal and Ijssel Rivers. By 2015, these rivers will be given more room at 39 locations, using a variety of strategies clearly illustrated in this promo video.
aa06259810