Hi everyone. If you follow SpeedForce on Twitter or Facebook, I want to apologize for the spam flood earlier today.

Someone took advantage of lenient moderation settings on our Flickr photo group and submitted a zillion spam images to the group. Those photos were then auto-shared out to Facebook and Twitter (and Tumblr, but fortunately I have that set to go into the queue instead of posting immediately, and none of them had gone live by the time I started cleaning it up).

Unfortunately, I wasn’t keeping an eye on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter at the time this happened, and it was over an hour before I saw the alerts from readers telling me that something was wrong.

I’ve cleaned up all the tweets and Facebook posts. The account that posted all the photos to the group has been banned and their images removed. Furthermore, I’ve tightened the moderation settings on the Flickr group: Only 6 photos/day are allowed, and for the time being all submissions will require approval.

That doesn’t change the fact that the spam posts went out and flooded your feeds, but I wanted to let you know what happened, and what I’ve done to prevent it from happening again.

Thank you to everyone who reported the problem, and I’m sorry I didn’t catch it sooner.

Follow-up: Lessons Learned.