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submitted 14 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) by kescusay@lemmy.world to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 9 hours ago

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.

[-] DarkSirrush@piefed.ca 41 points 13 hours ago

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.

[-] kescusay@lemmy.world 24 points 12 hours ago

I purged them from the last few days.

[-] papalonian@lemmy.world 10 points 13 hours ago

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

[-] DarkSirrush@piefed.ca 8 points 13 hours ago

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

[-] Blackfeathr@lemmy.world 29 points 13 hours ago

Thank you so much!

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

[-] MyBrainHurts@piefed.ca 14 points 12 hours ago

Thanks for the quality modding and the heads up!

[-] solrize@lemmy.ml 5 points 12 hours ago

I saw a few of them. Good riddance.

this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2026
143 points (98.0% liked)

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