I’m working on a multiplayer game and looking for the best way to scale my game servers dynamically based on active users. Right now, we’re facing issues with server overload during peak times and underutilization during off-peak hours.
I’ve looked into auto-scaling solutions from cloud providers, but I’d love to hear from others who have tackled this problem. What strategies or tools have worked best for you? Are there any cost-effective approaches that balance performance and budget?
I also came across a web development company called This that specializes in scalable infrastructure, but I’d love to get more firsthand experiences from developers who have implemented dynamic scaling successfully.
CooperJennifer, with the European-looking woman used as an avatar, is posting from Mumbai, India, while her profile says she/he is from Chicago, Illinois. I’m not sure why so many people from India and Pakistan sign up and pretend to be something they’re not, but it’s a regular occurrence.
Combine that with the post being off-subject for a graphic design forum, so I’m locking his/her account.
It’s getting tiresome. There is no other reason to come to a Graphic Design forum and post about something completely unrelated. It’s always pre-spam. I’m sure it’s something they are copying and pasting to anyplace they can.
AI has made it more difficult since people can hide their misspellings and odd grammar by uploading what they want to say to an LLM AI, and then asking it to rewrite the post in conversational English. However, the trouble with that is the spelling, grammar, and usage reads like a professional copy editor worked on it.
They often pick a large European or North American city as their location and then choose a photo of a nice-looking, stereotypical, European-looking young woman or man as their avatar. They either sign in from their IP addresses (usually Southern Asia) or use VPN servers in an attempt to hide their actual locations, which is a giveaway since no one would use a VPN server to sign into a forum after already listing their fake location in their profile.
The more of those boxes that are checked, the more likely it’s spammy advertising — especially when a company is mentioned in their first or second post.
Since I have a business email address, about once per month, I’ll get a sales pitch from one of these spam companies (usually in India) promising to place my business’s name on a specified number of high-profile websites. I suspect those who fall for this kind of scam-like offer are some of the companies that get mentioned here in spam.
That’s what I meant by ‘seemed natural’ but it’s clear to me it’s AI spam. Hard to spot for sure, especially when other seemingly harmless posts in line with the forum, and interactions. But this is the method, infiltrate the forum, seem natural, then hit with spammy posts or go back and edit posts to implement the ruse.
Wonder if there’s any anti-ai-spam detector or something
I think the spammers auto-generate the accounts on multiple forums and see what sticks, I don’t think it reads the forum rules or how the forum works, just starts creating accounts and making posts, and seemingly getting smart about what category to post in and what topic to post, until it gets to the point where they want to start tagging in their spammery.
Yep, but I doubt URLs are the point, except for naive and one-off spammers. Here’s why.
First, URLs are great for SEO purposes — the more URLs pointing to a site from other reputable, high-traffic sites, the better it is for the linked-to site since the search engine algorithms conclude it must be an influential site since it has many links pointing to it.
However, AI-assisted search engine algorithms aren’t stupid. They can easily spot link manipulation from spammers and downgrade the linked-to site rather than boost its SEO rankings. They don’t pay much attention to links on sites like this since the links are posted by forum members themselves. In addition, nearly every website where users can create posts automatically adds nofollow attributes to website links. These attributes signal to the search bots that the link is worthless for SEO purposes.
Over the past few years, spamming has moved from small sweatshops to medium-sized businesses that use automation, artificial intelligence, and proprietary software to scale up their businesses. They use email marketing to lure in naive customers who pay a few hundred dollars in exchange for the spam company favorably mentioning their customers’ businesses on hundreds of industry-related and high-traffic websites.
We needed to turn off automatic registration on this forum a few months ago. RKK and I manually approve or reject every new forum member who attempts to make a first post. I haven’t kept a tally, but we will probably reject and delete four out of five new forum members because they look like spam. Even then, we let a few get through, but they’re soon found out.
However, the spam companies don’t care. They’ve fulfilled their obligation to their customers to post messages that mention them.
The big problem for these companies is IP addresses. Those addresses aren’t free; they cost money. Once they’re blocked by the target websites and blacklisted by internet hosts, they’re useless. I don’t know how they get around this problem. I read an article a few months ago that said some of these companies are asking their employees to use their personal home IP addresses, but that only seems like a stop-gap workaround. I suspect some of these shady businesses have figured out something a bit more sophisticated since the amount of spam we’re blocking here has exploded over the past several months.
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