I don’t know how much of an issue this is for other people but it’s happened a few times to me so I figured I would make a news post about it.
On August 26, I got a weird comment on my news post about my “okinawa” project having this as the body:
Now as with every weird comment I get (especially from the infamous Jued guy going after people who play Geometry Dash on this site including me), I went and blocked this person straight away and also messaged Tom about this bot. The first sketchy thing about this is the name. I’m not familiar with weird bots on this site so I’m going into this blind but this name just screams “bot” to me. I do know that there’s been a time or two where people with strictly numbers as their username is not a bot (for example, the user lexycat had their old username as 1450 according to Geometry Dash like in this picture here. Please ignore my bad iPad handwriting…), but in my eyes it seems very rare.
Second thing which makes a lot of sense is the lack of a profile picture because every single one of these that I’ve gotten had no profile picture (Jued never has a profile picture either). The next thing is the message itself. You got a shady Discord link and then a message that kind of threatens the user to join or else Newgrounds will get hacked or something and shut down forever.
DO NOT CLICK THESE!!
Admittedly, I have not clicked on these myself. But since these comments are already sketchy by themselves, I would not trust any Discord server links from these users.
@AWildDomino had gotten a bot message a few days ago as well and shared this screenshot with me:
And more screenshots from me with two other bots (one of which is ironically named “newgroundsdeath”):
One more thing I’ve seen all these have in common is that they all have a weird set of words at the end. My guess is this is to bypass in order to send the comment in the first place. I’ve seen similar things with Geometry Dash bots and trolls putting a jumble of random capital and lowercase letters as well as numbers at the end of their comments in order to bypass the filter the game has set on it.
If you have any experiences with any “Newgrounds death” bots, you can do what I did. Take a screenshot of the bot in question along with the comment, put them on your block list, and then message @TomFulp about banning the account. From my experience, I’ve had three bots comment on my profile posts in a matter of days and I felt so bad messaging Tom about them lol… Just so you know, all of these bot accounts have been banned and their profiles will not show up.
Yeah, this is what I wanted to share with you all. Stay safe with these bots and have a good day/night! ^^
SkilledFanBoy
I also got links to shady discord site but I'm glad I didn't click it.
Kiraichu
The thing is all of these Discord links are have different invite URLs. I didn’t click them but either they refreshed the invite or there’s multiple servers.