Someone is just having fun, I imagine. Script kiddies like to discover vulnerabilities in websites for its own sake. They were barking up entirely the wrong tree here, of course; at no point is this data injected into a SQL query. (At no point is any user input injected into a SQL query.)

I'm honestly kind of impressed by the spambots that persistently hit the forum on my fanfic minisite, as in, the custom mini-forum that I coded myself from scratch. You shouldn't even know how to use this forum! It's not any forum software that you know! Is this what we're doing with those AI agents

Others might make a post that is innocuous and on-topic and then a while later they'll edit it to add a spam link, hoping mods will have already seen the original post and thus not look at it again. Clever, and also incredibly goddamn irritating! Marketing, ever determined to make everything worse.

Meanwhile, my forums have been getting some more devious bots that will do something like quote a previous post in the thread and express vacuous agreement. There's no link or anything, so it doesn't immediately look like spam. Except! Turns out they *edited the contents of the quote* to add a link!

Is there just one seedy company that owns hundreds of these cheap online games (for a while I got a bunch for what sounded like Wordle imitators) that's decided to advertise them by spamming forums? I guess the main hope might be if they're allowed to stand it might boost search rankings?

Sometimes people react to these kinds of things with bafflement that these things weren't discovered and fixed before the game was released, but... it took millions of people playing the game over twenty years to notice anything off with this; no wonder QA didn't.

I've trained a team to level 100 a couple of times since - I did on Sapphire and Black 2 - but I don't think I ever did on a game that actually had Charizard.

So I think my Charizard on Z-A just became my first ever level 100 Charizard, after all these years.

This! Is! Illegal! Consent for processing personal data for advertising must be freely given because I want personalized ads (I don't), not coerced because the only alternative is to cough up money! Fuck all the way offffff

You produce content shilling a client to whatever standard meets the minimum threshold to not get rejected by the unscrupulous blogger who is being paid to publish it. I produce thousands of words about Game Boy glitches for free because I am a giant nerd. We are not the same

As someone who makes actual research-backed high-quality content (that sometimes provides actionable insights and at other times is just fun for nerds), I'm always peeved by the implication that whatever marketing slop these spam farms want to push would actually qualify.