Been spotting multiple fake/spam accounts recently. Many seem to be removed pretty much instantly, but here are a few I’ve spotted that are still active,
All removed, thanks. And yes, Mansi creating a dozen or more spam posts masquerading as lists was a novelty. Thankfully they all get removed when the account is removed, and we don’t have to delete each individual one.
Deleting abusive profiles after the fact will be a losing strategy in the long term. The number of fake accounts and comments will only grow bigger from now on.
Site owners will need to take preventive actions. On a network level, checking and filtering source IPs against known blacklists could help. On the site itself, maybe preventing comments, lists creation and adding links in your profile description for 24 hours after a new account creation could discourage what we see now.
Removed most of the ones above. Left a few suspicious accounts that technically didn’t break any rules.
Marijn runs a script once a month to remove fake profiles as well, though I’m not privy to the mechanics of how that works. That’s an interesting suggestion on new account restrictions; not sure how easy that is to implement.
Left a few suspicious accounts that technically didn’t break any rules
I see that I accidentally included a few profiles I thought looked suspicous but didn’t mean to include. Sorry about that.
I’ve also been thinking how come these fake accounts appear so frequently and can seemingly be created so easily, and about what kind of measures could be applied to prevent this. I do like cobweb’s suggestion, though I’ve been noticing some “clean” fake accounts that have only later added links in their profiles. That could still cut the amount of spam accounts significantly.
Also, about Marjin’s script, how does the script find fake accounts? Does it look for profiles with links in them and zero checks? when was the script last ran? Looking at new profiles, browsing back, I can find fake accounts dating back as far as early August.
It’s kinda mindblowing to browse the profiles. I browsed back to the start of September, 47 pages worth of new profiles, 25 profiles per page, and roughly 90 % of them are fakes. That’s more than a thousand fake profiles in September alone so far, not counting the ones that get spotted and deleted right away or the ones users like myself have reported here. I realize that reporting them all here and you guys deleting them all by hand is a staggering amount of work and probably not worth it in the long run, especially when Marjin’s script seems to take care most of them.
Spammers use automated tooling mostly. That’s why it gets out of hand pretty fast.
The 24h “freeze period” is just one idea that would probably require some amount of work to put in practice. Maybe it would be best to try and prevent the abuse of the registration form first. Maybe by adding a logical question besides the captcha (what comes first between C and Y). Or adding an invisible field that only a bot parsing the form would fill.
On another note, a small portion of the spam is more subtle.
For example this profile: jacklinalbert's profile - iCheckMovies.com
They posted one comment that seems genuine at first but contains a marketing link when you read it entirely.
No, I deleted all of the ones you posted, I think. There were a bunch of cobweb’s that only had a spammy username, but no spam comments or links in their profile, so I left them for now. They may get caught by Marijn’s script later.
I don’t know how it works, I just know that it’s there, and he’s asked us mods to continue to manually remove spam profiles as we see them, and between the two methods we should be able to eliminated 95% of all fake profiles.
I think something has been implemented (I haven’t tried creating a new account recently), but it’s clearly not effective enough
Yeah, that type of spam has definitely become more prominent this year. I’ve deleted both of those profiles, thanks.
yeah, I removed a bunch yesterday too. bet88indo, for example, is clearly a spam account, but under our current terms and conditions, the username itself isn’t a violation, and since they haven’t posted any other links or spam, I’ve chosen not to remove it unless they come back and violate the terms.
yeah, I removed a bunch yesterday too. bet88indo, for example, is clearly a spam account, but under our current terms and conditions, the username itself isn’t a violation, and since they haven’t posted any other links or spam, I’ve chosen not to remove it unless they come back and violate the terms.