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"Essay writing" spam on Kodi blog #300

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JohnVeness opened this issue Oct 25, 2022 · 10 comments
Closed

"Essay writing" spam on Kodi blog #300

JohnVeness opened this issue Oct 25, 2022 · 10 comments

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@JohnVeness
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Hi. I was reading through old Kodi blog posts when I came across https://kodi.tv/article/fosdem-2015-presentation-videos/ and in particular, the suspicious-looking final paragraph:

Along with our main services we have opened the new one. It is called college essay help ((link removed). Due to the simple curriculum of college education and essay themes this subdivision deals with these kind of orders really fast. That is why almost all college students consider us as the main source of quality essays on the Internet. If you have any doubts, then you should use college forums and understand the truth of our every word.

The source is at https://github.com/xbmc/kodi-tv/blob/main/src/content/article/fosdem-2015-presentation-videos/index.md

This looks very much like someone at some point "hacked" the blog, possibly some years in the past, but I haven't looked into this further.

@ProfYaffle
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Thanks for that - that's the only mention of it I can quickly find on the Internet, so it's not a broad spam attack on multiple sites. Maybe we just had some personal attention...

I'll strip it out from that post now, and see if anything similar is on anything else.

@ProfYaffle
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@ProfYaffle
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Removed final paragraph from https://kodi.tv/article/fosdem-2015-presentation-videos/ - original text archived here:

Evaluation

Along with our main services we have opened the new one. It is called college essay help (linked to essaystore (dot) org). Due to the simple curriculum of college education and essay themes this subdivision deals with these kind of orders really fast. That is why almost all college students consider us as the main source of quality essays on the Internet. If you have any doubts, then you should use college forums and understand the truth of our every word.

@razzeee
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razzeee commented Oct 25, 2022

Yikes, you're right, seems to have happened on the old WordPress. Unfortunately Internet archive does not have a previous Version.

We should probably grep though the links and see if there is more.

@ProfYaffle
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Removed final paragraph from https://kodi.tv/article/xbmc-google-summer-code-2008-project/ - original text archived here:

Our essay help online service (linked to essaylab (dot) org) has already had some run. It was one of our original offers to do this. Along with actually writing your essay Essaylab.org is also able to check your ones.

@ProfYaffle
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Okay, I've modified what I can find - I think they're genuinely additions at the end of the page, rather than changing the text or overwriting anything, so I think we've lost nothing by just deleting them.

The website is rebuilding now. I'll leave this issue open for a moment in case we find more or need to reinstate any text.

Grateful thanks to @JohnVeness for spotting this and bringing it to our attention!

@JohnVeness
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Thanks for removing this spam!

While I was reading through the old blogs, I noticed some formatting errors (e.g. in https://kodi.tv/article/kore-new-official-android-remote/). Is there any interest in me doing PRs to try and fix these?

@pkscout
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pkscout commented Oct 26, 2022 via email

@JohnVeness
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Understood :)

@ProfYaffle
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I've not found any more of this stuff, so I'm closing this issue now. If we uncover any more, well, we'll deal with it then.

Thanks again.

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