U.S. Senate
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(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
Governor
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(D) Michael Bennet
(D) Phil Weiser
60%↑
50%↓
Att. General
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(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Jena Griswold
60%↑
40%↑
Sec. of State
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(D) A. Gonzalez
(D) J. Danielson
(R) Sheri Davis
50%
40%
30%
State Treasurer
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(D) Brianna Titone
(D) Jeff Bridges
(R) Kevin Grantham
40%
40%
30%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd*
(D) Somebody
80%
40%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert*
(D) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank*
(D) Somebody
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Manny Rutinel
(D) Yadira Caraveo
45%↓
40%↑
30%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
November 20, 2021 07:39 AM UTC
4 Comments
This has been happening for a long time on this site, and the junk posts are often in a variety of alphabets. I don't think it's Putin, but I do think there's a security problem here.
This latest onslaught of diaries in Russian does seem to be more malicious than commercial in intent; those spam diaries used to merely be a way for bots to collect email addresses from people who clicked on links in the diaries, or a way to direct visitors to gaming, porn, TV or foreign sites.
I ran one of the cyrillic diaries through Google translate, and found it was just the same old commercial content. I don’t know what the purpose would be of having those all in Cyrillic.
We've always had to contend with some amount of spam as a trade-off for having a publicly-accessible publishing platform that grants access without manual input. In the past few months, the principal WordPress plugin we've relied upon for security has been rendered ineffective and these huge floods of auto-posted spam, often in Russian but many other languages including English, have been the result.
As of this morning, we've taken the temporary step of fully disabling the automatic process by which new users are granted access to post. This should not affect the posting privileges of any existing users. We'll restore this functionality once we can do so without abuse.
Whether Putin or spambots are the culprit, we'll outlast them as we always have.
Good. I think that disabling automatic posting access is a long-overdue step, which will hopefully eliminate the endless spam diaries.