Talking about this like there's an "attack" feels very melodramatic. It seems to me like the non-constructive messages are either shitposts or just curious probes (testing whether certain codepoints make it through, testing whether bad no-no words make it through, testing how various things will render, testing whether the input is sanitized...). There's links to God knows what and some walls of inflammatory language, but I'm not noticing anything that could even remotely cause any harm.

The chat is still there in the corner of this post, with people typing nasty shit into it.

Well have fun delving into programmatic censorship I guess. Or just take it out. If you take the former path and post about trying to fix it here then I'm sure you'll get a lot more free testing of your attempts to enforce civility through regex or whatever. Enjoy learning about the Scunthorpe problem.

From the earliest days of websites allowing text input from users, this has been a thing. The same with any website that allows you to draw things, it will quickly show people drawing crude (in content not skill) objects. This is just human nature. Once people realized you could use these forms as attack vectors, we were off to the races. Now that bots can do it for you, I'd only imagine the time before first bot using the form is in minutes. I have seen all sorts of things suggested as workarounds to mitigate bot form submissions, but eventually, you will be spammed at the least with the feature. Adding something like a bot chat, of course people are going to be abusive to it much more than a simple form field.

For someone to be surprised by this today suggests to me that the person is really really new to managing a website.

I've done this to myself too. I once had a thermal receipt printer I wasn't using, so I decided to point a webcam at it and put it on a webpage so anyone could print random crap to it (it's actually still up - alnwlsn.com/printer). Of course I went in knowing full well what I was getting into, and the types of messages posted to it are about what you expect and get here. Some highlights:

- It was once found by one of those worse-than-4chan places, who spent about 4 hours spamming the worst things you could imagine until it ran out of paper. I added some filtering after that to stop tons of duplicate messages from wasting so much paper and some regex, which reduced the volume of some particularly vile things. Some people do post nice messages too.

- The setup breaks often. Eventually, I'll notice and fix it, but it might have been broken for months. Inevitibly, there will be people using it again within days, with no announcement made. How enough people find it on this tiny corner of the internet is a mystery to me, but they do. I am convinced most of them are real people, because why even bother to point a bot at it?

The whole point was that I thought it would be more interesting than letting the thing sit around on a shelf, and to use up the box of rolls that came with it instead of throwing the whole thing in the trash. Intersting it is; I don't think I would describe it as plesant, but it is interesting.

I’d suggest one additional heuristic: once your bad word detector has triggered, shut down the chat for 10 minutes. That way waves of assholes don’t monopolize the chat, and when they move on to the next target the functionality returns to your site automatically.

I'm mostly curious why anyone would bother with doing attacks like this to some random individuals personal blog, was it one person or multiple people? What was the motivation? Is it just bots crawling the internet to spread hate?

A sad state of affairs, but certainly seems like having a strictly moderated comment section is a better option for a site like this.

Reminds me of Maria Abramovic Rythym 0 performance art.

1: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/3/30/maria-abramovic...

The obvious solution is shutting it down it does offer nothing.

Short of that shadow ban everyone everyone sees their own messages, and add a few fake ones every now and then.

Like an idiot, I once wrote a simple, internal, in memory chat room via web page at work. Because it let you pick a nickname, co-workers immediately gave themselves names of other employees and started sexually harassing each other and being asses. I pulled it down immediately before they got me fired. Anonymity does something to some people. They lurk among us biding their time, looking for any opportunity to be reputationally unrestrained.

"What I learned" seems to missing what used to be shared to every starting web developer; "If you allow user input on public internet pages, people will put vulgar, racist, hacking attempts and worse there, sometimes constantly over long periods of time"

Almost anyone who had a "guest book" had pre-moderation some way or another, or was a tiny-tiny website with barely any visitors. The second the larger cyberspace ecosystem got a whiff of your user-input-enabled website, the spamming would appear.