---
title: "Starlog And The Case Of The Missing Issues And Owner"
description: "The Starlog AI content spam campaign gets scrubbed: 383 GitHub issues vanish, the basicScandal account tied to Bishop Fox disappears, but the operation continues at a lower, harder-to-detect pace."
pubDatetime: 2026-04-12T02:00:00Z
author: hrbrmstr
tags: ["ai", "github", "slop", "spam", "integrity", "investigation"]
---
> Original: [Starlog And The Case Of The Missing Issues And Owner](https://ai.rud.is/posts/2026-04-12-starlog-take-two)

The [Starlog investigation](https://ai.rud.is/posts/2026-04-04-starlog-and-the-case-of-the-missing-llm-tag/) has taken a hard turn. Last week it was just a missing tag and a suspicious backlink scheme. This week the evidence itself has started disappearing.

Run a GitHub search for ["starlog published"](https://github.com/search?q=%22starlog+published%22&type=repositories) in issues right now and you'll get zero results. A week ago there were 383 of them. The [issue on hrbrmstr/pewpew](https://github.com/hrbrmstr/pewpew/issues/38)—the one that started this whole thing – is gone. Not closed, not locked. Gone.

![zero starlog issues](img/zero-starlog-issues.png)

The `basicScandal` account that filed all those issues is [gone too](https://github.com/basicScandal).

![basicScandal](img/basic-scandal.png)

That's a notable deletion given that `basicScandal` was listed as a contributor under the [Bishop Fox](https://github.com/BishopFox) organization. A real security consultancy, not some throwaway account. Someone with actual professional stakes made a decision to scrub the trail.

![bishop fox](img/bishop-fox.png)

The [Wayback Machine caught a snapshot](https://web.archive.org/web/20260403210256/https://github.com/basicScandal) before the cleanup, if you want to see what was there.

![wayback basicScandal](img/basic-scandal-wayback.png)

What's interesting is what didn't disappear: the posting has continued, just slower. The pace since April 4th is nowhere near the 186-issues-in-a-day spike that originally flagged this. The RSS and timing data bear it out.

![rss](img/starlog-rss.png)

![beeswarm](img/slower-beeswarm.png)

*(The beeswarm pulls timestamps from the articles against GitHub issue creation dates – it's a cleaner picture of the burst pattern than the raw counts.)*

So the content's still going up. The articles still follow the same five-section structure. The byline is still "Rob Ragan." But the blast radius has been surgically reduced: no more mass-filed issues, no more obvious automation fingerprint, no more easy GitHub search to count the campaign. It's the same operation running at a pace a human could plausibly maintain, which is exactly what you'd do if someone wrote a post about your automated campaign and you wanted to keep the domain authority accumulation going without the optics.

Whether someone at Bishop Fox made a call or `basicScandal` acted independently isn't something I can determine from here. But the cleanup was targeted and fast. You don't accidentally delete 383 issues and a GitHub account.

If you happen to have a lingering one open, keep the issue closed (GitHub is wonky these days). Don't add the badge. And if the pace picks back up, we'll be there to catch it.