Spambots have hacked TWG

[Young Bard he/him]

I have no idea why, but there seems to be a spambot that's managed to post on January 24 in the TWG. In fact, since the sites closure, there appear to have been 71 more posts made.

 

Judging by the fact that it took six months for anyone to notice, I don't think it's a major issue, but I find it incredible to see the lengths the spambots will go to to set up spam files in a dead forum which nobody reads anymore. In fact, if you look at the posts made, they were actually in the 'Suggestion Box' section, which is possibly the least looked at section, seeing is there is nothing relevant there anymore.

 

For reference, here is the offending spambot.

 

I'll leave it up to you what you decide to do with it. I was only trying to look up an old Brandon response when a scrolled down to the 'Recent Posts' section, saw the date, and was rather surprised...

[king of nowhere]

They don't "go to any lenght" to set up spam files. they are automated programs. they find forums, they post there. they have even no way of knowing if it  is active or not.

[Chaos he/him]

Yeah, I do need to go clear those out... Permissions on that board are so screwy, and I always think I've gotten it right, but apparently not. It's bizarre.

[Ookla the Absent]

Since I don't have anywhere else to ask, what exactly is the purpose of TWG? I've accidentally gotten there a couple of times, but what is it?

[Young Bard he/him]

Since I don't have anywhere else to ask, what exactly is the purpose of TWG? I've accidentally gotten there a couple of times, but what is it?

TWG was the fansite for Brandon Sanderson before the 17th Shard. Then it got hacked by spambots, and Chaos used the opportunity to make a new fansite (consequently, bringing the whole thing up to date), rather than fixing the old, outdated one. However, as there are lots of old WoB's in there, and a heap of other stuff as well, a read-only version is kept for reference.

[Windrunner he/him]

That's part of it, but it's a little different than that. TWG was a fansite for a variety of other authors, who were at the time mostly unknown. I believe they all knew each other pretty well, and it started, in part, so that they could all stay in touch (I want to say that most knew each other from The Leading Edge or BYU, but I may be misremembering that). Dan Wells was there as well, if you know his work. As Brandon became more popular, his section of the forums started to dwarf the others, and kind of take up a lot of space. That's when the Josh, Mi'ch, and Eric as well as a few other admins who are less active nowadays decided to spin off a Brandon dedicated community to give TWG a little more space.

After that, it continued on for a few more years but gradually got less and less active (thus the high density of spam posts you see) until it eventually bit the dust (Was it DDOS'd?). All the people who had originally wanted to stay in touch had Facebook and other methods of communications by then. That's when we became Brandon's official fan forums.

The read only version is fun for people who used to post there and still want a way to view there old posts. I think almost all the official Brandon stuff (Q&A's, cosmere stuff, etc) have since been moved, but it can be kind of fun to see him posting on a forum like a normal guy and how things were before he took off as an author.