Spam

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Revision as of 22:27, 11 December 2025 by Rscr (talk | contribs) (Blobfish spam)
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Spam is unwanted repetitive content intended to render a medium of communication useless for a period of time, or to cause annoyance to users.

Users throughout OWOT's history have complained about the overabundance of spam, which has almost always drowned out original content at Spawn. While spam is generally seen as inevitable, FP(the only active admin) is known to moderate it on a regular basis, undertaking actions such as: ratelimiting, color banning, or IP banning spammers, performing rollbacks to restore destroyed content, or updating the site's code in order to brick specific spam scripts. Despite this, dedicated spammers have generally been able to circumvent these measures and attack the site for prolonged periods of time.

On their part, regular users can fight spam by clearing it manually. They can also use a wiper script, though these are subject to abuse and tend not to be handed out freely. And while FP is the only admin on the OWOT Frontpage, several trusted users have been given the ability to perform rollbacks on /main using a tool known as the time machine.

Chat Spam

Rigged Poll

"Rigged Poll" is in reference to the World of the Day Poll, which was known for its lack of security and its tendency to have illegitimate votes favor one particular World of the Day candidate. Prior to the events leading to the poll's replacement with an automated ratings system, it was very easy for a single user or a small group of individuals to launch a Sybil attack on the poll by placing an "x" character next to the world name over the course of a few days. It was one of the duties of a front page member to protect each vote that gets added to the poll, as long as it's not obvious that somebody is trying to rig the votes. A frequent occurrence was also the removal of legitimate votes from the poll by users who did not originally vote for that world. This eventually leads to unpopular worlds receiving the World of the Day status. For most of the poll's history, the front page members did not regard the votes on the poll, hence the meaning of Rigged Poll.

The W Chat Spam

Spammers use these to clear the chat since it's a long character and can sometimes be more annoying if they spam each time with a different ID.

Canvas spam

This section contains documentation for common types of spam on the OWOT canvas, and also for notable spammers/instances of spam.

Road spam

Road spam
Last remnant of the road spam in 2025(the curve at the top was added by JRT)

In 2020, multiple different colored roads were pasted on the canvas that appear to lead to nowhere in particular. They would wind around randomly and go over each other, extending for hundreds of coordinates.

The damage done by the road spam was incredibly difficult to rollback due to its sheer scale, but FP was able to accomplish this in 2022 using a newly introduced time machine feature.

Black and white snapshot of the 2020 road spam
Before they were cleared, multicolored roads extended for hundreds of coordinates, forming a massive tangled mass around spawn.This image is a large snapshot of the mainpage from that era.

Replicator spam

Links that replicate themselves when clicked.

Replicator spam was a big issue during the early days of OWOT, being responsible for damaging thousands of coordinates of text.

A notable example of replicator spam from recent times is the Chess Pieces spam from 2023.

Particle spam

Image paste spam

Fireworks spam

Unicode fireworks that slowly explode on the canvas. The script was originally created by FP for less destructive purposes, but has since been exploited for spam. You can see it in action here at 1:00.

Like many other spam scripts, the firework script has also been ported to Your World of Text in black and white form.

PKK

StormXXBoy

Known for advertising his website using rainbow colored spam.

"Only Gays Here" spam

Emoji Spam

SLC spam

Spam consisting of SLC slopes which would spread in strange patterns.

These appeared throughout the first half of November 2025. Around the same time, the creator also created an image paster that utilized SLC slopes.

Spreading in real time

Blobfish spam

An onslaught of vaporeon image pastes that began appearing on November 11th, 2025. It spread rapidly over the following months, eventually covering over a hundred coordinates on all sides. FP took an active role in fighting this spam wave and dubbed it the "blobfish spam."

Pacman spam

"Whatever, go my pacmen" ― Anonymous message sent before each onslaught

Spam from December 2025 which uses a script by gimmickCellar. Surprisingly, this wasn't the first time that a large amount of pacmen were released into Spawn.

Miscellaneous

Notes

  1. "this caused ~718 unique constraint errors" - FP