Jesus... what a nightmare.

Were these all using your free plans?

Oh yes.

Never ending.

We still keep the free plans even through there are abusers, but that won't be a reason to retire it. So many people using for legitimate reasons and keeping their personal writing there.

It's unfortunate, but well, it happens.

Why do you think they were using your platform to do this?

Is it because these scammers were non technical?

Or maybe the anonymity provided by your platform?

2 theories

1. Highly technical, because the flow was scripted to work with our website. Bypassing captcha, email verification by using many different domains, email accounts and also highly distributed via many ips.

2. Non technical. Where they paid some ppl to do it manually, which doesn't seems to be due to the way they walk through many steps like piece of cake.

However, our platform was/is a target due to several reasons:

1. Easy to register and start blogging. 2. Free plan with no hard limit. 3. Quick rankings due to SEO implementation out of the box. 4. Absence of any moderation before such attack.

And probably some other possible reasons that made their job easier and us a better target.

If I was this sort of scammer, I’d have the text being posted and progression of how hard it is to figure out pretty well ironed down. Then you just try it on lots of platforms to find the ones that don’t figure out how to solve the issue. So my guess would be they tried because they might as well, and then they hit the limit of how much effort they had put into their own generation systems and moved on to the next mark.