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META: Banning Townflex
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kescusay lemmy.world kescusay@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-07-02
(edited) Quote

Hey everyone, just a quick heads-up. This community has been getting flooded with content from a site called "Townflex" that looks like it just republishes stories from elsewhere. I'm provisionally banning the site, because it's difficult to assess their credibility, and the sheer flood of posts from it were beginning to look like site promotion - i.e., spam. Over the next few weeks, I'll work on a bot to automatically remove submissions from the site.

If you've got a good reason for me to rethink this policy, please let me know below.

168   Original
DarkSirrush piefed.ca DarkSirrush@piefed.ca
Joined: 2025-06-07
#2 · Quote Reply

If it helps, I have not seen a single one of those posts, which means its likely being posted by an account with the bot flag.

48
papalonian lemmy.world papalonian@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-09-29
#3 · Quote Reply

If it helps, I have not seen a single one of those posts, which means its likely being posted by an account with the bot flag.

I have bot posts enabled and only see one from 4 days ago. The posts may have been purged.

13
DarkSirrush piefed.ca DarkSirrush@piefed.ca
Joined: 2025-06-07
#4 · Quote Reply

I have bot posts enabled and only see one from 4 days ago. The posts may have been purged.

I scroll piefed quite a lot, so if they weren't a bot I would likely have noticed the flood as it happened.

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The Velour Fog lemmy.world Blackfeathr@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-06-12
#5 · Quote Reply

Thank you so much!

Townflex is essentially a clickbait ad-riddled site with a cheap thin veneer of a few news articles over it.

33
MyBrainHurts piefed.ca MyBrainHurts@piefed.ca
Joined: 2025-09-22
#6 · Quote Reply

Thanks for the quality modding and the heads up!

15
kescusay Moderator kescusay@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-07-02
#7 · (edited) Quote Reply

If it helps, I have not seen a single one of those posts, which means its likely being posted by an account with the bot flag.

I purged them from the last few days.

28  [mod]
solrize lemmy.ml solrize@lemmy.ml
Joined: 2023-06-22
#8 · Quote Reply

I saw a few of them. Good riddance.

6
P03 Locke lemmy.dbzer0.com p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Joined: 2023-06-23
#9 · Quote Reply

Good, I wanna say I saw this website pop up a lot when I found bot user accounts.

I'll point to this post as a suggestion for other forums, if I see similar patterns.

9
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