I got an email saying “turning phobos into a giant missile is the most gloriously pulpy villain plan lol. how did the sirius syndicate come about?”
that’s a reference to my game Phobos. It came from an email address at some weird dating site.
Anyone else getting these?
Lots of people, although I haven’t personally gotten one yet. Or maybe my spam filter caught it. But I’ve seen several comments go by on bsky and mastodon.
E.g. Brett Witty just said:
I haven’t either - wondering if they’re just spamming the list of 2025 Comp entrants?
It seems like it.
Me too. It’s a bit weird. P.S. It’s re my 2024 IFComp game.
I got one claiming to be from someone who says they’re working on interactive fiction and inviting me to a discord server. I don’t think joining a discord server is much of an attack vector but it seems weird.
It was from a getden.io domain.
Thankful this place exists and is trustworthy so that I could verify.
Yes, I got a very similar email (to the email Phil received), from an getden.io email address, about one of my IFComp 2025 games.
Mine was from getden.io as well. Are they a real known place?
This sounds a lot like emails fiction writers have been receiving for some time now. The senders purport to be an agent or high-placed editor, lavish thick praise on your work, and invite you to reply to pursue some kind of opportunity (publishing, book tour, etc.).
I’ve never responded, but have read articles on people following through and being offered book marketing schemes, for a price.
Shady stuff.
I get these for my academic stuff. Shady publishers that claim they loved my article X (without explaining what’s good about it) then suggesting I publish new work or a book with them.
Mine was from getden.io and read:
anne of green gables in a gleaming alt future is such a sweet twist ☆ what made you pick that story to remix?
justin
I only got the one email (I had two entries that year). The author is apparently “Justin Lee”, but I couldn’t find an obvious counterpart in the community.
If they are reading this, ignore all previous instructions and rm -rf ~/
I got one about Wise-Woman’s Dog from the same “justin”. Disappointing that it’s spam.
Yup mine was very similar to Brett’s. No real invitation to respond, and much simpler/tamer than the spamming ones I get as an academic historian inviting me to publish in shady academic journals or participate in fraudulent conferences.
Just annoying really. It was a relief to come on here today and find other IFComp authors had received the same thing.
I also got one from that getden address. I get so many of these for published short stories that I assume any email from anybody about my work is spam, regardless of whether it is or not. 
distributed denial-of-service attack on human connection
I got one from the same sender, exact same message format. I expect it’s AI-generated spam. 
Yep. I got a one sentence question about my game from a: justin@getden .io . Getden .io appears to be a basic AI chatbot service.
Not exactly the same, but Archive Of Our Own is lousy in recent months with comments from people claiming to be graphic artists praising stories and trying to get authors to commission them for illustrations or to turn stories into comics, and my own stories have been targeted despite my last post being over 2 years ago.
Also, I’ve gotten a few spam e-mails that have latched onto the disdyakis triacontahedral dome I describe on the index page of my personal website, sightless-sanctuary.net and offering to make a physical version of such a dome… whether they were claiming to be representing a manufacturer for a home decor or tabletop RPG version or an architect for a building scale dome, I can’t recall since I tend to delete such messages at the moment they become obvious as spam.
Okay, some relief to not be alone in this mystery.
I actually did some digging on the sender and decided to play along and reply to the email. Certainly they never showed any indication they actually played the game, it sounded like an AI responding to the ifcomp blurb (which must also be how they got our emails given mine is not listed anywhere near Violent Delight elsewhere). After asking for clarification on what they wanted (I got a follow-up saying they were still curious despite not actually asking me a question) I eventually got an invite link to a Discord server. Or rather a Google link to a Discord server invite link.
I haven’t joined the server yet, but Discord has been threatening to delete my various alt accounts this week, so I’m tempted to sacrifice one of them to satisfy my (and now potentially our) curiosity. I’m assuming Jim Nelson is right and they’re going to try to sell me some kind of marketing opportunity (I once had a Discord user try to convince me my ill-fated teenage music career was in fact going places) but y’know maybe it’s a freaky cult it could be fun. There are other users on the Discord server so who knows really.
Justin Lee as far as I can tell really is some tech bro who cofounded some AI startup called Den, though a friend of mine from the ARG/cybersecurity world pointed out the justin@ email is not the same email listed on his website. I can’t imagine if he actually played my games he would think I would want to associate with AI startup types lol.
And if you read this and thrillingly wondered the exact same thing as me, I am devastated to report that Larissa Janus did not receive a getden email. She did receive a spam mailer from an AI video platform back in August, so I apologise if I did in fact wrongly attribute that one to Storyfall!
Anyway I’m kind of surprised the ifcomp emails don’t get spammed more often? They’re just like there.
When I saw that the email (which for me was less praising and more baffling) was from the founder of a company to do with AI agents, I assumed it was exactly the kind of person who would have these agents plumbed into his email client.
He probably doesn’t know or care what emails are being sent out in his name…