Spammers

[Ben Haller]

Sorry for that last post, folks.  Spammers have been trying to get into the group for a while now, and I've been fending them off, but one made it in just now as you saw.  In their join request they wrote: "I'm using SLiM for forward-time population genetics simulations in my research and would like to engage with the community for questions and discussion."  I took that as legit, but obviously it wasn't.  I'm guessing it was written by AI; indeed, I'm guessing the whole process was all done automatically by AI.  So I'm going to have to clamp down now.  Perhaps I will have to require that people join with an institutional email address as an extra security measure.  What a world we live in, ugh.

Ironic that non-spam posts from long-time group members get rejected as "spam" by the list all the time, but actual spam from a member who joined just moments ago gets posted without moderation.  Sigh.  Whatever Google is doing with their own AI technology, they sure aren't applying it to making Google Groups work better.

Cheers,
-B.

Benjamin C. Haller
Messer Lab
Cornell University