

I’ve seen a general increase of scammers targeting furries, primarily with taking art commissions that they very likely won’t fulfill at all (or maybe throw some ai gen thing at you, dunno). I think the furry community has just grown enough out of obscurity to be targeted more, and that probably includes barq.
I have set my socials to only be visible to mutuals, which seems to have prevented the spam you’re experiencing.
I do wonder if there’s any selection bias in the hardware survey steam does. I’m sure they sample randomly, but I think a user on Linux might be much more eager to participate in the survey than a Windows user, simply because Linux users tend to have a desire to be more vocal about their OS use than Windows users.