Spam accounts! Spam accounts everywhere! · 4:26pm Oct 24th, 2023
...Well, mostly not impacting the actual experience on the site, to be fair.
Not yet, anyway.
But yeah, this morning a weird account created today happened to catch my eye. I've seen a few others like it before as well, but didn't think about it. Spam's a fact of life. Normal internet problems, ya know?
Something made me go digging deeper this time.
So I started looking at the most recently created accounts, and what they are.
They're ALL spammers. Thousands of accounts worth.
Okay, maybe not all. Maybe there's some legit new users sprinkled in, few and far between. It was hard to tell. But if so, they're probably a fraction-of-a-percent minority of accounts being created at this point.
That's a LOT of spammers just able to create accounts at will.
Like I said, doesn't seem to be impacting the actual site experience much (yet). But it's a concern that if this goes on, someone's eventually going to figure out they can create accounts for easy spamming, and decide to really get aggressive about it. Then it'll be an impact.
Look, I'm not staff / moderator / admin here. I don't know what the solution is, exactly, so I can't prescribe one. But I know this is a brewing problem, so ideally I'd like this to be a wake-up call to seek mitigation from whoever is positioned to do that. If nothing else, I think it's better for everyone to be aware of it so that everyone can watch for it and be ready to report it and maybe have their own mitigation ideas and plans in place if things do erupt.
What were they posting?
5751980
Just the usual link-farm garbage. Mostly as comments on their own accounts, sometimes slipping links into their bio lines, etc.
5751982
Ah, jeez. I'll make sure not to click any sus links.
Yeah, I also had that same problem, with spam accounts
Keep reporting them, eliminating them by hand at this time is what we have.
5751986
Will do!
It looks like thousands of accounts, so it may take a while, but I'll do what I can. Maybe if some other people volunteer we could chop it up into manageable blocks for trusted actual human people to look through and report on?
5751987 No worries, usually we'll get them reported and we go over them in batches
This has been going on for a while: they broke through in 2020 and it's only been getting worse by the year. Remember that site-wide post about phishing scams from a while back? IIRC, that was 'coz of them.
The good news is that most of the bots just call it a day once they’ve created an account and plopped a URL in their bio, so they aren't doing too much damage in the grand scheme of things. That being said, sometimes you'll get one that spams a bunch of blogs advertising whatever it is they're advertising, and very rarely you'll see one sneak into the comments section of a fic or two in New; those are the ones I go out of my way to report.
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I've been getting a spam comment every morning on the same blog for the past three days. I'm happy to keep knocking them down if they keep lining up, but it's still a concerning trend.
5751986
I know it's a thankless task, so...thank you.
Back the fight against these bots🚬🗿
5752068
I do notice you submit a lot so thanks!
👍